The role of orthography and visual form on word recognition

It is mostly agreed that in order to identify a visually presented word, both the identity and the position of it's constitute letters must be encoded. However, currently most models of word recognition only start after the processes involved in letter encoding has been completed: the so called “visual word form” level. These models concentrate on the process involved in the encoding of the letter position, giving several different solutions to the encoding problem. The problem here is not necessarily that there are different solutions but that each solution is as good at modelling the current data as the next. Thus the solution to disambiguating between them may lie in a better understanding of the sublexical processes involved. Although this seems a logical step it is surprising that very little research has been carried out regarding these processes. The aim of this current PhD project is to address some of the issues involved with investigating sublexical processes, and to start a systematic investigation of several early perceptual processes that may modulate visual word recognition