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[Max Coltheart]

Models Of Reading Aloud: Dual-Route And Parallel-Distributed-Processing
Approaches


Max Coltheart, Brent Curtis and Paul Atkins
School of Behavioural Sciences
Macquarie University
Sydney NSW 2109
Australia

email: max at currawong.mqcc.mq.oz.au

Submitted for publication March 23, 1992.

Abstract

It has often been argued that various facts about skilled reading aloud cannot
be explained by any model unless that model possesses a dual-route
architecture: one route from print to speech that may be described as lexical
(in the sense that it operates by retrieving pronunciations from a mental
lexicon) and another route from print to speech that may be described as
non-lexical (in the sense that it computes pronunciations by rule, rather
than by retrieving them from a lexicon). This broad claim has been challenged
by Seidenberg and McClelland (1989, 1990). Their model has but a single route
from print to speech, yet, they contend, it can account for major facts about
reading which have hitherto been claimed to require a dual-route architecture.

We identify six of these major facts about reading. The one-route model
proposed by Seidenberg and McClelland can account for the first of these, but
not the remaining five: how people read nonwords aloud, how they perform
visual lexical decision, how two particular forms of acquired dyslexia can
arise, and how different patterns of developmental dyslexia can arise.
Since models with dual-route architectures can  explain all six of these
basic facts about reading, we suggest that this remains the viable
architecture for any tenable model of skilled reading and learning to read.


Preprints available from MC at the above address.