This final report on the relationship between orthographic characteristics and reading behavior consists of five chapters. The first chapter examines writing in its variety of forms in different cultures, noting that such differences can provide important clues to how the brain processes visual information. The second chapter addresses the issue of orthography and reviews results of cross-language research and comparative reading studies in order to achieve a better theoretical and practical understanding of the fundamental psychological processes of reading behavior, both in their acquisition and in their developed functioning. The third chapter describes three experiments that investigated the nature of deaf children's reading inability, while the fourth chapter critically examines the conceptualization between two experiments that presented words in the format of mixing upper and lower case letters to gather evidence for visual reading in skilled readers. The fifth chapter addresses the issue of orthography, reading, and higher cortical functions and examines how the brain adapts to orthographic variations across and within different languages. (HOD)