Abstract
The wide-open doors to lexical access
Highlights
Reading requires complex abstraction of the highly variable alphabetic visual input, which allows the access to the abstract orthographic categories that are in turn the door to the retrieval of phonological, morphological, lexical, and semantic representations
If we consider the concepts of a door and a window, it seems relatively straightforward to define the semantic relation between them
How is it possible that readers are able to compute the semantic relation between these two written codes through a simple eye fixation of 250 ms? What does reading imply for the human brain? And where and when in the brain does reading take place?
Summary
Reading requires complex abstraction of the highly variable alphabetic visual input, which allows the access to the abstract orthographic categories that are in turn the door to the retrieval of phonological, morphological, lexical, and semantic representations. In that fraction of a second the expert reader manages to access the meaning represented by the written symbolic and arbitrary graphic patterns. This phenomenon represents a model of human abstract symbolic thinking, since there is no direct relation between the meaning of a word and its written form.
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