Nonword pronunciation and models of word recognition.

Abstract
Nonword pronunciation is a form of generalization behavior that has been at the center of debates about models of word recognition, the role of rules in explaining behavior, and the adequacy of the parallel distributed processing approach. An experiment yielded data concerning the pronunciation of a large corpus of nonwords. The data were then used to assess 2 models of naming: a model developed by D. C. Plaut and J. L. McClelland (1993), which is similar to the one described by M. S. Seidenberg and J. L. McClelland (1989) but uses improved orthographic and phonological representations, and the grapheme-phoneme correspondence rules of M. Coltheart, B. Curtis, P. Atkins, and M. Haller's (1993) dual-route model. Both models generate plausible nonword pronunciations and match subjects' responses accurately. The dual-route model does so by using rules that generate correct output for most words but mispronounce a significant number of exceptions. The parallel distributed processing model does so by finding a set of weights that allow it to generate correct output for both "rule-governed" items and exceptions. Some ways in which the two approaches differ and other issues facing them are also discussed. The task of reading words and nonwords aloud has played a central role in the development of models of word recog- nition. Reading makes use of knowledge concerning the correspondences between the orthographic and phonologi- cal forms of words. This information is used in recognizing words and pronouncing them aloud (see Seidenberg, in press, for a review). Current models differ in their assump- tions about how this knowledge is acquired, represented, and used. Dual-route models assume that there are separate lexical and sublexical procedures for generating pronunci- ations (for an overview, see Patterson & Coltheart, 1987; for critiques, see Humphreys & Evett, 1985, and Van Orden, Pennington, & Stone, 1990). The specific version of the dual-route model developed by Coltheart and his colleagues (Coltheart, 1978,1987; Coltheart, Curtis, Atkins, & Haller, 1993) assumes that in alphabetic writing systems, knowl- edge of the correspondences between orthography and pho- nology is represented in terms of rules translating graph- emes into phonemes. The rules are used in naming words whose pronunciations they correctly specify (sometimes

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