This study looks at the left ventral occipital-temporal cortex (lvOT) — a brain area that identifies a string of letters as either a word or nonsense.
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“The lvOT essentially acts as a gatekeeper, quickly determining if a string of letters is a real word that’s worth sending along for further processing or a nonsense jumble that can be ignored. This “lexical categorization” process is thought to be a crucial early step in efficient reading.
Here’s where Gagl and Gregorová’s work, published in the journal npj: Science of Learning, comes into play. They developed a computational model called the Lexical Categorization Model (LCM) that simulates how the lvOT makes these word/nonword decisions. The model assumes that the lvOT gauges the “word-likeness” of a letter string based on its similarity to all the words a reader knows.”
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Reading a putt on a green surface would also seem to have a “lexicon” or meaningful features, like slope and green speed, but also distinct surface features like humps and swales.
