Abstract:   Letter/character position information plays an important role in visual word recognition. In this article, we review three representative models of letter position encoding, i.e. the Open-Bigram Model, the Spatial Coding Model, and the Overlap Model. In addition, we review main experimental findings on letter/character position encoding in alphabetic language reading and Chinese reading. Finally, we point out some remaining open questions regarding Chinese character position encoding, and propose some new trends in this line of research.

Key words:  reading, word recognition, letter/character position encoding, transposed letter effect