Grainger, J.
CNRS & Aix-Marseille University
Independent lines of research have led to dual-route accounts of various phenomena related to skilled reading. Here I will present a general architecture for single word reading that integrates dual-route accounts of phonological and morphological processing. The adoption of this general dual-route perspective begins by considering how the processing of orthographic information might be optimized during reading acquisition, with this optimization being constrained by prior knowledge of phonology and morphology. The resulting dual-route approach to orthographic processing draws a key distinction between a coarse-grained and a fine-grained processing route that involve two fundamentally different types of orthographic code. Processing along the coarse-grained route optimizes fast access to semantics by using minimal subsets of letters that are determined by the constraints imposed by letter visibility on the one hand, and by the relative diagnosticity of letter combinations on the other. Processing along the fined-grained route, on the other hand, is sensitive to the precise ordering of letters, as well as to position with respect to word beginnings and endings. This enables the chunking of frequently occurring contiguous letter combinations that form relevant units for morpho-orthographic processing (prefixes and suffixes) and for the prexlexical translation of print to sound (multi-letter graphemes).