Modulo's Fireside Chat with Rachel Tidd (Founder of Wild Learning)

[@luccalele9740]

Does the brain also do orthographic mapping when reading whole words by sight? Or is the phonics/breakdown a key component?

[@joinmodulo]

Thank you so much for this great question! I had to do a bit of research, but here's what I found. The process of reading involves both whole-word recognition and phonetic decoding, and the brain uses different pathways for these tasks. Here's what the research suggests: 1. Whole-word reading: Some studies indicate that familiar words, particularly those with unique spelling-sound relationships, are processed in the ventral visual stream, accessing whole-word lexical representations. This suggests that the brain can indeed perform orthographic mapping when reading whole words by sight, separate from phonetic decoding (Wingerak et al., 2017). 2. Phonetic decoding: For unfamiliar or pseudowords, the brain engages sublexical processing pathways in the dorsal visual stream, demonstrating phonetic decoding. This process benefits from and even enhances whole-word orthographic processing (Ehri, 2014). 3. Integration of phonological and orthographic information: Even though whole-word processing and phonetic decoding might be distinct, they are interconnected. Studies show that orthographic learning is enhanced by whole-word visual processing and that phonetic decoding plays a role in the orthographic mapping process, particularly when learning new words (Bosse et al., 2015). While orthographic mapping can occur with whole-word reading by sight, phonetic decoding remains a crucial component in the reading process, particularly for unfamiliar words. The brain utilizes both lexical and sublexical pathways, depending on the familiarity and complexity of the words being read.

[@luccalele9740]

@@joinmodulo wow thank you for the thorough response. I’m going to dig into all of this you found. I appreciate it! Such an interesting topic and how amazing how much research has found about what the brain does when reading. It really does seem to come down to a combination of both but phonics is feeling more important than ever. I also wonder about language development in the sense of speaking and understanding - I learned English as a second language by reading Harry Potter, which is so funny how knowing that many words are made up in that book but I remember reading with a dictionary next to me. The way my brain processed a new language and mapped out an entire system of words makes sense thinking of orthographic mapping too. I feel that I am a pretty good speller in English due to how I learned the language via reading it. Just a random thought to add in! Thanks for all the info!

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@@luccalele9740 It's truly incredible how much brain research has been done and how much we've learned about how human think and process information.