This article proposes a neurobiological account of reading and reading disability suggesting that for normally developing readers, the dorsal (tempo-parietal) circuit predominates at first, and in conjunction with premotor systems, is associated with analytic processing necessary for learning to integrate orthographic with phonological and lexical-semantic features of printed words. The ventral (occipito-temporal) circuit underlies fluency in word recognition. (Contains references.) (Author/DB)