Psychology 2134A/B Lecture : Reading

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 2134A/B
• Professor: Marc Joanisse

Document Summary

In this class we will look at answering these important questions. If we look at what is active in the brain when a person is reading words, we see that it"s not just one part of the brain that is active. Instead readers are activating a large number of brain regions (coloured in orange/red in the brain image below): The fact that there is no single "reading centre" is important it tells us that reading is more than just a single cognitive task. Instead it involves coordinating different types of knowledge. Here is a simple model of what is happening as you recognize a word. Our eyes take visual input and identify letter features. These are used to access the spelling of a word, which in turn must be translated into either the sound of a word (its phonological form) or the meaning of the word (its semantic form). We know lots about words: orthography, phonology, semantics, syntax.