Do we need more than 50.000 words in the orthographic lexicon to be able to read?

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15448/1984-7726.2019.2.34510

Keywords:

Decoding. Reading. Invariant features of letters. Grapheme values in written Brazilian Portuguese. Levels of Hierarchy.

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to explain the reading decoding process. I begin at the moments preceding it (choosing what to read, pre-reading, eye-fixation, up to the phase when stains are sprayed and then turned into invariant features). A convergence then occurs, and the invariant features of both left and right V4 areas are sent to the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex. Recycled neurons, then, recognize which, how many, and how the invariant letter features combine for differentiating one letter from another. I emphasize a rather neglected difference in reading processing models, between letter recognition and graphemes, demonstrating that letter recognition is language independent, while the grapheme value, or phoneme, is its raison d’être, for the grapheme represents the phoneme in the writing system. I present the orthographical context independent values many graphemes have, in the written Brazilian Portuguese (BP), as well as several cases of predictability of the values depending on the orthographical context or through metalanguage and/or the morphosyntactic and semantic textual context. Several arguments falsify the existence of an orthographic lexicon for the decoding of words, as an obligatory condition for their recognition.

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Author Biography

Leonor Scliar-Cabral, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, SC

 

Professora Emeritus, Dra, Professora Titular (Aposentada).
Professora colaboradora do Programa de Pós-Graduação em
Linguística da Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), Florianópolis, SC, Brasil.


 

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Published

2019-11-06

How to Cite

Scliar-Cabral, L. (2019). Do we need more than 50.000 words in the orthographic lexicon to be able to read?. Letras De Hoje, 54(2), 122–131. https://doi.org/10.15448/1984-7726.2019.2.34510

Issue

Section

Processamento da decodificação e da compreensão da leitura: