details of shape — horizontals, verticals, dots etc.Letter to sound mapping is all locked into a precise, hierachchial sequence of neural events. This must be carried out in milliseconds or comprehension collapses.
A grammatical analysis is also going on. The subject and object of a sentence must be identified before the brain starts to analyze the meaning of the sentence, so if there is any slowness in the phonological or orthographic analysis then the brain never gets to the meaning level, or only imperfectly so. |