The role of orthography in reading and writing is not a new topic of
inquiry. For example, in 1970 Venezky made a seminal contribution with
The Structure of English Orthography in which he showed how both
sequential redundancy (probable and permissible letter sequences) and
rules of letter-sound correspondence contribute to orthographic
structure. In 1972 Kavanagh and Mattingly edited Language by Eye and by
Ear which contained important linguistic studies of the orthographic
system. In 1980 Ehri introduced the concept of orthographic images, that
is, the representation of written words in memory, and proposed that the
image is created by an amalgamation of the word's orthographic and
phonological In 1981 Taylor described the evolution of properties.
orthographies in writing systems-from the earliest logographies for
pictorial representation of ideas to syllabaries for phonetic
representation of sounds to alphabets for phonemic representation of
sounds. In 1985 Frith proposed a stage model for the role of
orthographic knowledge in development of word recognition: Initially in
the logographic stage a few words can be recognized on the basis of
partial spelling information; in the alphabetic stage words are
recognized on the basis of grapheme-phoneme correspondence; in the
orthographic stage spelling units are recognized automatically without
phonological mediation. In 1990 Adams applied connectionism to an
analysis of the orthographic processing of skilled readers: letter
patterns emerge from the association units linking individual letters.
