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Orthography, Reading, and Cerebral Functions

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The Alphabet and the Brain

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Abstract

Research on reading has regained the attention of experimental psychologists in the last two decades (Tzeng, 1981). The new field is markedly interdisciplinary, and addresses questions of practical application as readily as questions of pure theory or knowledge. These questions have been attacked from a number of different perspectives, using various experimental paradigms. Some studies record patterns of eye movements and relate them to various phases of information pickup during reading comprehension (Thibadeau, Just, & Carpenter, 1982). Others look into specific characteristics of word perception, e.g., the word-superiority effect, and attempt to build interactive models of human information processing (Rumelhart, 1985). A third type of study examines the consequences of becoming literate in more than one writing system. For example, differences as subtle as phonemic awareness and as general as problem-solving strategies have been observed in such comparative reading studies (Scribner & Cole, 1978; Liberman, Liberman, Mattingly, & Shankweiler, 1980; Tzeng & Hung, 1981).

This work was supported in part by National Institutes of Health grant to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies (HD 13249), in part by a research grant from the Academic Senate of the University of California, Riverside, and in part by a Research Fellowship from the Wang Institute of Graduate Studies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of California, Riverside, CA, 92521, USA

    Ovid J. L. Tzeng

  2. The Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, CA, USA

    Daisy L. Hung

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  1. The McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology, University of Toronto, 39A Queen’s Park Circle, M5S 1A1, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Derrick de Kerckhove (Co-Director) (Co-Director)

  2. Sociobiology Research Group, Department of Medicine, University of Toronto, Medical Sciences Building, Room 7313, M5S 1A8, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Charles J. Lumsden

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Tzeng, O.J.L., Hung, D.L. (1988). Orthography, Reading, and Cerebral Functions. In: de Kerckhove, D., Lumsden, C.J. (eds) The Alphabet and the Brain. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-01093-8_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-01093-8_15

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