A person with normal reading ability can read a word incredibly fast, in less than a second. That is becauseon the first reading of a word, the brain encodes it visually and phonetically. But when the term is already learned, it isrecognized only visually, as if it were an object without a sound part, which speeds up reading. The mechanism has been described by a team of neuroscientists from Georgetown University (USA) who presented their finding at the annual meeting of the American Society for Neuroscience.
To study the brain’s reading strategies, the authors performed a test of recognition of words that are different but sound the same in English (homophones) on 12 volunteers while they underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging. The experiment showed that different neurons were activated, exactly the same as when reading two words that do not sound alike. ? This suggests thatour brain always uses the visual information of a wordand not the sounds “, concludes Laurie Glezer, who has led the study. This visual representation allows? fast and efficient recognition of words, a characteristic ability of good readers”, adds the researchers, who assures thattrained readers develop a purely orthographic representation of wordsafter many years of reading.
ThedyslexicsHowever, they have problems with phonetic processing of sounds, which would prevent them from developing a visual representation of the words that helps them to recognize them. “For them, there is no benefit to using the ‘visual dictionary’ to process words faster,” says Glezer, who hopes his work will help address these problems.
