NOTIONS ON READING VIEWED BY COGNITION

Abstract The objective of this article is to introduce to translators, professors as well as graduate and undergraduate students how the brain works to enable us to extract meaning from a string of letters being focused by the fovea under the attentional beam: to read. In order to initiate novice readers to the topic, the introduction explains the relevance of the matter by providing factual numbers of the functional illiteracy in Brazil. Secondly, a broad overview of the eye-tracker is provided as a tool to measure latencies and show the fixations of the eyes while reading. Thirdly, parts of the eyes related to the reading skill are presented. At last, an account of the Visual Word Recognition is accorded describing the processes that support the mapping of spelling-to-sound spelling-to-meaning, emphasizing that words are coded and analyzed at multiple levels. The functional relationships between orthographic, phonological, and semantic variables are explored. There is an attempt to focus on both the interactive processing between different layers as well as the architecture and processing dynamics of the visual word recognition system.