Two general topics are discussed: 1) the sequence of events that transpire in one second of reading, to suggest the nature of the processes that link them; and 2) the relation of this description to the acquisition of reading. Reading involves a rapid succession of intricate events—formation of visual icon, letter-by-letter identification, and association with meaning through transposition into abstract phonemic representation—carried out with amazing rapidity and coordination in our complex information processing system. When first approaching reading, the child lacks the character recognition device (the scanner) and the device to convert the characters, once recognized, into systematic phonemic representations (the decoder). Specification of the mechanism by which letters are mapped onto entries in our mental lexicon is the fundamental problem of reading research.
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