In this introduction to the special issue on sublexical representations in visual word recognition, we briefly discuss the importance of research that attempts to describe the functional units that intervene between low-level perceptual processes and access to whole-word representations in long-term memory. We will comment on how the different contributions to this issue add to our growing knowledge of the role of orthographic, phonological, and morphological information in the overall task of assigning the appropriate meaning to a given string of letters during reading. We also show how the empirical findings reported in this special issue present a challenge for current computational models of visual word recognition.