As writing systems are a relatively novel invention (slightly over 5 kya),¹ they could not have influenced the evolution of our species. Instead, reading might recycle evolutionary older mechanisms that originally supported other tasks^2,3 and preceded the emergence of written language. Accordingly, it has been shown that baboons and pigeons can be trained to distinguish words from nonwords based on orthographic regularities in letter co-occurrence.^4,5 This suggests that part of what is usually considered reading-specific processing could be performed by domain-general visual mechanisms. Here, we tested this hypothesis in humans: if the reading system relies on domain-general visual mechanisms, some of the effects that are often found with orthographic material should also be observable with non-orthographic visual stimuli. We performed three experiments using the same exact design but with visual stimuli that progressively departed from orthographic material. Subjects were passively familiarized with a set of composite visual items and tested in an oddball paradigm for their ability to detect novel stimuli. Participants showed robust sensitivity to the co-occurrence of features (“bigram” coding) with strings of letter-like symbols but also with made-up 3D objects and sinusoidal gratings. This suggests that the processing mechanisms involved in the visual recognition of novel words also support the recognition of other novel visual objects. These mechanisms would allow the visual system to capture statistical regularities in the visual environment.6, 7, 8, 9 We hope that this work will inspire models of reading that, although addressing its unique aspects, place it within the broader context of vision.

由于书写系统是一项相对新颖的发明（略超过 5 kya），¹它们不可能影响我们物种的进化。^{相反，阅读可能会循环使用最初支持其他任务2 、3}并且在书面语言出现之前的进化旧机制。因此，已经表明，狒狒和鸽子可以被训练来根据字母共现中的拼写规律来区分单词和非单词。^{4 , 5}这表明通常被认为是特定于阅读的处理的一部分可以通过域通用的视觉机制来执行。在这里，我们在人类身上测试了这个假设：如果阅读系统依赖于领域通用的视觉机制，那么在正字法材料中经常发现的一些效果也应该可以通过非正字法视觉刺激观察到。我们使用相同的精确设计进行了三个实验，但视觉刺激逐渐偏离了正字法材料。受试者被动地熟悉一组复合视觉项目，并在古怪的范式中测试他们检测新刺激的能力。参与者表现出对特征（“bigram”编码）与字母符号串以及组成的 3D 对象和正弦光栅的共现的强烈敏感性。这表明新词视觉识别所涉及的处理机制也支持其他新视觉对象的识别。这些机制将允许视觉系统捕捉视觉环境中的统计规律。6,7,8,9 我们希望这项工作能够激发阅读模型，尽管解决其独特的方面，但将其置于更广泛的视觉背景中。