Abstract

Communication via written words is one of humanity’s greatest inventions and plays a critical role in modern society.  This chapter outlines the key cognitive, neural, and computational aspects of the reading system.  In so doing, it shows how reading takes advantage of domain-general processing abilities and bootstraps written communication from other neurocomputational systems, including vision and spoken language processing.  It also explains how failure in different parts of the reading system can lead to reading disorders such as dyslexia.  Furthermore, emerging trends reveal exciting new directions for reading research, including advancing the understanding of how the brain changes as a function of learning to read, how the brain adapts to process different languages, and how to formalize our understanding of reading in more biologically plausible models.  This chapter thus outlines how an interdisciplinary perspective to understanding reading has and will continue to advance our understanding of reading in ways that are critical for both fundamental and applied aims. 

Keywords: reading, visual word recognition, visual word form area, neural networks, dyslexia, neural plasticity, connectionist models.

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