This collection of essays examines how our visual and language systems interact in relationship to reading.

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• Addresses four important questions concerning the role of vision in reading
  
• Presents recent findings from neuroimaging literature along with important recent work concerning how letters and letter strings are processed
  
• Investigates what constraints the visual system and eye movement control set on visual word recognition
  
• Discusses the role of the left and right visual field, together with the right and left hemispheres in visual word recognition
  
• Evaluates what information the brain computes when we read a word questions the contribution of the visual system on reading disability

Piers L. Cornelissen is a Reader in Psychology at the University of York, UK. As an undergraduate he studied medicine at Worcester College, Oxford, UK, continuing his clinical training at St Thomas’s Hospital in London. He studied for a D.Phil. with Professor John Stein at the University Laboratory of Physiology, Oxford, funded by the Wellcome Trust. After three years as a McDonnell-Pew postdoctoral Fellow, he moved to Newcastle upon Tyne to take up a lectureship, and most recently to the University of York as a Reader. The main thrust of his research is to understand the neural basis of reading using a combination of psychophysical and neuroimaging techniques (MEG and fMRI).

Chris Singleton is a Chartered Psychologist and Senior Lecturer in Educational Psychology at the University of Hull. His main research and professional interests are in the development of literacy and the identification and education of children and adults with dyslexia and other learning problems. He is internationally known for pioneering research that resulted in the development of computer-based systems for screening and assessment of dyslexia, visual stress and other cognitive difficulties, now widely used in schools, colleges and universities in the UK and elsewhere in the world. Dr Singleton is an editor of the Journal of Research in Reading and was chair of the National Working Party on Dyslexia in Higher Education.