The what, where, when, and how of visual word recognition Carreiras, M., et al (2014)

Why care about reading? My interests: language development, teaching literacy, Speech-Language Pathology career goal, my preschooler friends. Problems with reading: dyslexia, memory loss, reading-haters Your interests? Why might the authors care about the wh- questions that they’re asking? How are the questions connected? How does the “when” relate to the “how”, the “what” to the “when”, etc.?

Life before now: the blackbox Basically, before the technology we have now, researchers proposed “hidden units” or a “blackbox” that received input (visual orthography) and gave an output (word recognition) It was their way of saying “we don’t really know what’s going on inside the brain” This review article tries to sum up the advances made in connectionist models due to technology.

Connectionist Models This paper talks A LOT about connectionist models and we’re always talking about these models in BCS classes, but what are they? I still don’t really understand how they work. I wish the authors had spent some time reviewing the concepts of connectionist models instead of assuming the reader has so much knowledge. Raj explanation or the video posted on Piazza?

Top-down, Bottom-Up? What? Does the visual stimulus (the words) go into a “lexical level” in a hierarchical manner and then orthographic representations go through the “higher-level” stuff?  bottom up Does “higher-level” stuff (sound and morpheme structure) have an influence on how visual orthography is processed early on in recognition?  top-down Disclaimer: This is what I unpacked from their jargony, nonsense definitions.

The what Building blocks of printed language What are these stored as? Shape by shape? Letter by letter? Morpheme by morpheme? Whole word? Multiple words? I don’t think they really answered this.

The when Can not be accounted for by fMRI because BOLD measurements are slow – we know this. MEG & EEG can reveal the temporal order of neural processes involved in recognizing visual words Look at neural responses (N###s) during different tasks to reveal the time course of activation I thought I was following the data they were presenting and I was like “oh this is cool, I get where they’re going” and then they say “these data clearly challenge the notion of temporal and structural modularity in orthographic processing” and I’m not sure what they’re trying to say. Is there not a temporal course? ----- Meeting Notes (2/12/15 15:11) ----- they say modularity and mean feedforward system

The where fMRI has provided the opportunity to ask very specific ‘where’ questions Task-based, looking at activations, drawing conclusions Still a big debate about the bidirectionality of the pathways mentioned in the article Do they interact with each other or is it all like a one- way street? Different results  different conclusions  support different theories Will we ever really have an answer? I’m not even going to talk about all of the terms, but a lot of people were concerned with the “putative visual word form area” according to the internet, its function is still in debate.

The how Requires very explicit computational processing mechanisms = models, models, models. Seems like the author has a bit of a preference towards the Interactive Activation model, which is based on both top-down and bottom-up processing of representations. Models seek to connect the what, where, and when to give us the how

What I got out of it Researchers have “pinpointed” the locations in the brain, but what does that do for us? Why should we care WHERE these things happen? (besides the obvious: deficits and injuries) We have all these models and now we can compare them to see which provide more realistic accounts of what’s going on during reading. There’s a lot going on in a lot of different places and we still don’t know enough, but we know much more than the blackbox answer!

Shortcomings What’s going on in the other hemisphere?? They totally ignored the right side. I was hoping they would talk a little bit more about the development of these systems (as that’s my interest). Understandable for them to not talk about development because we don’t really understand what’s going on in the fully developed system to begin with. Maybe studying longitudinally throughout development could aid in figuring out these wh-q’s because we could see what changes and in what ways and at what points in literacy do we see these changes.

Question/Concerns What do the constraints of possessing different orthographic, phonological, and semantic representations have on visual word recognition in the case of bilingual and multilingual readers? How might these processes develop throughout literacy growth? What about syntax?