Abstract
A great deal of our time as adults is spent reading: Deriving meaning from visual symbols. Our brains, which may have evolved to recognize a lion, now recognize the written word “LION”. Without recognizing the letters that comprise a word, we cannot access its meaning or its pronunciation: Letter recognition forms the basis of our ability to read. In this symposium, we will highlight work by a growing number of researchers attempting to bridge the gap in research between vision and language by investigating letter recognition processes, from both a behavioral and brain perspective.