The oral spelling process for logographic languages such as Chinese is intrinsically different from alphabetic languages. In Chinese only a subset of orthographic components are pronounceable and their phonological identities (i.e., component names) do not always correspond to the sound of the whole characters. We show that such phonological…

Resilient readers are characterized by impaired phonological processing despite skilled text comprehension. We investigated orthographic and semantic processing in resilient readers to examine mechanisms of compensation for poor phonological decoding. Performance on phonological (phoneme deletion, pseudoword reading), orthographic (orthographic…

We have a surprising tendency to misperceive the center of visually presented words (Fischer, 1996, 2000a, 2000b). To understand the origin of this bias, four experiments assessed the impact of letter font, letter size, and grapheme-phoneme convergences on perceived stimulus center. Fourteen observers indicated the perceived centers of words,…

The purpose of the present study was to compare the brain regions and systems that subserve lexical and sublexical processes in reading. In order to do so, three types of tasks were used: (i) silent reading of very high frequency regular words (lexical task); (ii) silent reading of nonwords (sublexical task); and, (iii) silent reading of very low…