The best known example is Japanese. In the Japanese language there are about 100 consonant-vowel syllables, which are combined into words. An alphabetic symbol has no meaning on its own and is useful only for the way it can be combined with other symbols to form words. One of the earliest alphabetic systems was Greek, which is said to have developed out of the ancient Phoenician writings. Reading and writing are extremely complex tasks, their complexity is often taken for granted by those who learned how early on, but consider how difficult it is to read and write outside of one's primary language.
Considerable effort is required in order to develop some mastery over reading and writing.
The direct lexical hypothesis states that written symbols get processed directly into meaningful elements, while the phonological recoding hypothesis states that written symbols get converted into their respective sound elements prior to being processed. In terms of language, there is a big difference between, let's say, object identification , recollection , and comprehension . Early on in the study of understanding scientists believed that the brain simply copied or recreated the environment within the mind prior to processing. Textbase or language comprehension involves the parallel processing of linguistic information on the phonological, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic levels. Another important aspect of comprehension is forming hypotheses , which is a conceptually driven process in which one attempts to predict what a speaker or writer will be saying based on our expectations, prior knowledge, and contextual clues.