The world beneath the fingertips and the cognitive processes that make it possible
Learning to read is a complex task requiring the translation of written symbols, or graphemes, into speech forms, or phonemes. Despite the complexities of written language, the majority of children who are given appropriate instruction learn to read either print or braille with relative ease. However, there is a proportion of people who struggle in the process of acquisition. While print reading difficulties have extensively been studied, braille reading difficulties have, due to several reasons, received much less attention. In the current talk the results of our previous as well as most recent studies, answering some of the posed questions, will be discussed.
In our earlier studies, being inspired by the major theories explaining impairments in print reading, we investigated auditory, speech and phonological processing as well as tactile spatial acuity, to gain an understanding of how these perceptual and cognitive processes interact in support of reading braille as opposed to reading print. In our most recent study, the online lexical interpretation in braille reading was investigated.