The what, when, where, and how of visual word recognition

•Early visual word recognition is constrained by feedback from anterior areas.•fMRI evidence cannot adjudicate between theories on the temporal flow of information.•EEG/MEG reveals the temporal flow of information during word reading.•Functional connectivity shows that orthographic coding is shaped by higher representations.•Biological plausible connectionist models can unify existing empirical research.

A long-standing debate in reading research is whether printed words are perceived in a feedforward manner on the basis of orthographic information, with other representations such as semantics and phonology activated subsequently, or whether the system is fully interactive and feedback from these representations shapes early visual word recognition. We review recent evidence from behavioral, functional magnetic resonance imaging, electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography, and biologically plausible connectionist modeling approaches, focusing on how each approach provides insight into the temporal flow of information in the lexical system. We conclude that, consistent with interactive accounts, higher-order linguistic representations modulate early orthographic processing. We also discuss how biologically plausible interactive frameworks and coordinated empirical and computational work can advance theories of visual word recognition and other domains (e.g., object recognition).