English: Brain pathways for mirror discrimination learning during literacy acquisition. Upper: The Visual Word Form Area ※ (in red) presents mirror invariance before alphabetization. And mirror discrimination for letters after alphabetization.

A key aspect of alphabetization is——to set in place the——audio-visual mapping known as “phoneme-grapheme correspondence,” whereby elementary sounds of language (i.e., phonemes) are linked——to visual representations of them (i.e., graphemes) (Frith, 1986).

Lower: During alphabetization, "the VWFA can receive top-down inputs with discriminative information from phonological," gestural (handwriting) and speech production areas and "bottom-up inputs from lower level visual areas." All these inputs can help the "VWFA to discriminate between mirror representations," thus correctly identifying letters to enable a fluent reading.