FIGURE 4.

The orthographic depth hypothesis by Katz and Feldman (1983) posits that different reading routes are engaged depending on the type of grapheme/phoneme correspondence of the language being read. Shallow orthographies with consistent grapheme/phoneme correspondences favor encoding via non-lexical pathways (assembled reading; green triangle), where each phoneme is sequentially mapped to its corresponding grapheme. In contrast, deep orthographies with inconsistent grapheme/phoneme correspondences favor lexical pathways (addressed reading; violet triangle), where phonemes are retrieved from memory structures. With regard to this framework, we propose that the topographic effects 300–360 ms after stimulus onset (red square) reflect a modulation of the routine non-lexical pathways in PW reading by the stronger recruitment of lexical pathways in the deep than shallow language context. Reading in a shallow context activates the non-lexical pathways more strongly than reading in the deep context, which reinforces the non-lexical processing routinely recruited in pseudoword (PW) reading (green arrows). In contrast, reading in a deep context activates the lexical pathways more strongly than the shallow context, which reduces the engagement of the non-lexical pathways routinely recruited in PW reading (red arrows).