Description

1.      Introduction

Reading is a complex process by which readers interact with written prints, resulting in comprehension (Hans & Hans, 2013, Lachman and van Leeuwen, 2014), a process, which draws on a variety of brain functions to link symbols to words and concepts (Waldie et al., 2013) based on pre-existing skills. Over the years, reading has gained significant interest from researchers of different fields, especially in the linguistic and psychological domain. Research evidence has shown the enormous impact of learning to read on the human mind and brain (Dehaene et al., 2010; Dehaene Cohen, Morais, & Kolinsky, 2015). As part of everyday life, reading has played a crucial role in the history of human development as a means of communication, storytelling, and information dissemination essential to how humans think, work and remember details.

Reading has been described as a serial object identification, where each word serves as an object (Pelli & Tillman 2007). The ability to read is not innate but is instead acquired relatively slowly from a prolonged period of procedural learning, which develops throughout childhood. However, it is paramount to understand the mechanism and processing skills needed for letter reading.  To attain a normal level of reading relies solely on the recruitment, modification, and coordination of existing special skills from the visual and auditory domain (Lachmann & Van Leeuwen 2014), which are then automatized to stabilize reading and writing skills. The key to learning to read effectively depends on being able to recognize letters, words, and punctuations in the language; thus, skilled readers consider reading as an effortless and automatic task. Although according to Lachmann & van Leeuwen (2014), reading is not a matter of certain letters and sounds, instead letters and sounds are elements that concretize the complexity of procedural learning processes, which takes years to get automatized. Letters play an integral and crucial role in reading alphabetic orthographies (compare Winskel et al., 2018). They are fairly arbitrary shapes or symbols that come to be associated or represent particular sounds of a language (Winksel et al., 2018). Letter reading is a very complex cognitive task because they are the smallest meaningful units of written texts configured from meaningless little scribbles (Lachmann & van Leeuwen 2014). Burgund, Schlagger & Petersen (2006) believed that during reading, letters are processed accurately faster than similar non-letters shapes as a result of long-term training and familiarity with the alphabets and letter shapes. Letter recognition is essential. However, how individuals can quickly and effortlessly identify letters, objects, or symbols has been a fundamental question of reading research (Pelli & Tillman 2007). According to Lachmann and van Leeuwen (2008), letter processing is associated with special perceptual strategies used for reading letters and non-letter symbols. These strategies include analytic and holistic processing, established during the early phases of reading acquisition. Visual stimuli can be processed either analytically or holistically (Piepers & Robbins, 2012). Visual perception is naturally holistic to some extent; most times it is effective to employ an analytic strategy. For instance, holistic visual perception would not permit one to see the tiger hiding in the bushes, but analytic perception may be very useful to carry out the task.