A Dual-Route Perspective on Brain Activation in Response to Visual Words:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2989181/
A Dual-Route Perspective on Brain Activation in Response to Visual Words: Evidence for a Length by Lexicality Interaction in the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA)

"This absence of a length effect is critical as it suggests that, in the standard lexical decision task, pseudowords are not processed by the serially operating sublexical route, but by the lexical route. This means that in the standard lexical decision task, whole letter strings of both words and pseudowords are matched against stored orthographic word representations (see Coltheart et al., 1977)."

The evidence of lexical decision by lexical route supports the use of "whole-word" or "Visual-based" reading strategies as a valid primary approach to reading instruction.

"Hence, one would expect a length effect for words even at these levels of the coding hierarchy. Obviously, this was not the case as the word length effect ceased to be reliable in the posterior fusiform ROI. This absence of a word-length effect is suggestive for orthographic whole-word recognition."

Again, supporting reading instruction by "whole-word" or visual-based reading methods.

"In general, the length by lexicality interactions in left temporal and frontal regions are broadly consistent with the position of several authors that the sublexical “phonological” reading route poses specific demands to language regions of the left hemisphere (Borowsky et al., 2006; Pugh et al., 2000; Sandak et al., 2004).

The demands that sublexical "phonological" reading places on the language regions of the left hemisphere, suggests that some persons struggling with the effects of Auditory Processing Disorders and/or some forms of Auditory-based dyslexia may have an easier time learning to read with a whole-word or visual-based approach.

None of this is to suggest the omission of phonics-based instruction, rather is may suggest that some individuals may benefit from a whole-word or visual strategy to reading as the primary instruction with a sublexical "phonological" strategy as the secondary instruction.

Man on a mission...
http://www.readwithdyslexia.info