Figure 1
From Massol and Grainger (2022). Stimuli are first encoded via location-specific gaze-centered complex feature detectors. Location-specific complex features then activate location-invariant object identities that are assigned an order in the string. Crucial is the hypothesized distinction between two different location-invariant order-encoding mechanisms: a generic order encoding mechanism, illustrated here by a simple ordinal representation (e.g., R(3), there is the letter R at the 3rd position), and a letter-specific order encoding mechanism – open-bigram coding (e.g., R-H, there is an R before an H, possibly with other letters/characters in between). Note that although the component letters of open-bigrams are ordered, the bigrams themselves are not.
Figure 2
Extension of Grainger and van Heuven’s (2004) model of orthographic processing to the case of multiple words (letter strings separated by spaces). Location-specific letter detectors operate in parallel across multiple words, signaling the evidence that a given letter identity or inter-word space is present at a given location relative to eye fixation. This information is used to activate ordered pairs of contiguous and non-contiguous character combinations (26 letters augmented with the space character—#) stored as an unordered set of open-bigrams (a bag of bigrams). Bigrams then activate whole-word orthographic representations for unique word identification.
Figure 3
Connecting processing at the letter, word, and sentence levels during reading by using comparable paradigms to investigate processing at each level (Figure from Brossette et al., 2022).
Figure 4
A “box and arrows” representation of the main processing phases involved in transitioning from a visual representation of strings of letters to meaning during skilled adult reading in a language that uses an alphabetic script.10 In red are “read-out” mechanisms that connect core processes with decision-level processing required to perform a particular task (Grainger & Jacobs, 1996).