The phonological route relates written letters to spoken sounds through rules for sound/ letter correspondences, such as the correspondence between the letter and the phoneme /n/ in the English words son and bent. The visual route describes how individual words are accessed through a lexical store without passing through phonology, as in words like yacht or though Users do not employ the same process for all words but shift between them. Even in a sound-based system such as English, frequent words such as wash and heard are accessed through the visual route (Seidenberg, 1985).