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Orthography and Word Recognition in Reading

01 May 1982-
About: The article was published on 1982-05-01 and is currently open access. It has received 460 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Logogen model & Word recognition.
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Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: A parallel distributed processing model of visual word recognition and pronunciation is described, which consists of sets of orthographic and phonological units and an interlevel of hidden units and which early in the learning phase corresponds to that of children acquiring word recognition skills.
Abstract: A parallel distributed processing model of visual word recognition and pronunciation is described. The model consists of sets of orthographic and phonological units and an interlevel of hidden units. Weights on connections between units were modified during a training phase using the back-propagation learning algorithm. The model simulates many aspects of human performance, including (a) differences between words in terms of processing difficulty, (b) pronunciation of novel items, (c) differences between readers in terms of word recognition skill, (d) transitions from beginning to skilled reading, and (e) differences in performance on lexical decision and naming tasks. The model's behavior early in the learning phase corresponds to that of children acquiring word recognition skills. Training with a smaller number of hidden units produces output characteristic of many dyslexic readers. Naming is simulated without pronunciation rules, and lexical decisions are simulated without accessing word-level representations. The performance of the model is largely determined by three factors: the nature of the input, a significant fragment of written English; the learning rule, which encodes the implicit structure of the orthography in the weights on connections; and the architecture of the system, which influences the scope of what can be learned.

3,642 citations


Cites background from "Orthography and Word Recognition in..."

  • ...Studies of the role of syllables and morphemes in visual word recognition have yielded inconsistent results, with some yielding evidence for decomposition into these components, whereas others have not (see Henderson, 1982; Seidenberg, 1989, for reviews). These inconsistent results may indicate that what is relevant to processing is not syllables or morphemes, but properties of words that are correlated with these structures. As we ohserved at the beginning of this article, syllables and morphemes are inconsistently realized in English orthography. Just as the properties of written English make it difficult to formulate a set of rules governing orthographic-phonological correspondences, they also make it difficult to formulate parsing rules that will yield the correct decomposition into component parts. Moreover, there has been little agreement among linguists concerning the definition of the syllable (see Hoard, 1971; Kahn, 1976; Seidenberg, 1987; Selkirk, 1980). The inconsistency of spelling-sound correspondences in English led us to abandon the notion of mapping rules in favor of weighted connections between units; the analogous inconsistencies in terms of syllables and morphemes might require abandoning parsing rules for the same reason. At the same time, the orthography does provide cues to syllabic and morphological structures. Morphemes, for example, are sublexical components that recur in a large number of words. As such they tend to be very high frequency spelling patterns. Consider, for example, a prefix such as PRE-, which recurs at the beginning of a large number of words. Empirical studies have suggested that the prefix and stem of a word act as perceptual groups (Taft, 1985). Does this grouping occur because the reader decomposes the word into morphemic components or because prefixes tend to be extremely high-frequency spelling patterns? Similar considerations hold in the case of syllables. The syllabic structures of words will tend to be realized in the orthography by inhomogencities in the distributions of letters because syllables are properties of the spoken language and the orthography is alphabetic. Hence, "syllabic" effects could occur in word recognition not because readers recover syllabic structures per se, but only because they are affected by orthographic properties that are correlated with syllables. In sum, the hypothesis is that effects of units such as syllables and morphemes in visual word recognition are secondary to facts about how these units are realized in the writing system. Thus, effects of these structures would be an emergent property of a model, like ours, that only encodes facts about orthographic redundancy and orthographic-phonological regularity. We are currently examining this hypothesis (see Seidenberg, 1987, 1989, for discussion). There is already some suggestive evidence in this regard. Treiman and Chafetz (1987) have shown that subjects are sensitive to the division of syllables into onset and rime....

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  • ..., frequency, orthographic redundancy, orthographic-phonological regularity) that influence access to lexical representations and then meaning (Henderson, 1982; McCusker, Hillinger, & Bias, 1981)....

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Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: Analysis of the ability of networks to reproduce data on acquired surface dyslexia support a view of the reading system that incorporates a graded division of labor between semantic and phonological processes, and contrasts in important ways with the standard dual-route account.
Abstract: A connectionist approach to processing in quasi-regular domains, as exemplified by English word reading, is developed. Networks using appropriately structured orthographic and phonological representations were trained to read both regular and exception words, and yet were also able to read pronounceable nonwords as well as skilled readers. A mathematical analysis of a simplified system clarifies the close relationship of word frequency and spelling-sound consistency in influencing naming latencies. These insights were verified in subsequent simulations, including an attractor network that accounted for latency data directly in its time to settle on a response. Further analyses of the ability of networks to reproduce data on acquired surface dyslexia support a view of the reading system that incorporates a graded division of labor between semantic and phonological processes, and contrasts in important ways with the standard dual-route account.

2,600 citations


Cites background from "Orthography and Word Recognition in..."

  • ...Furthermore, the semantic representation of a word participates in oral reading in exactly the same manner as do its orthographic and phonological representations, although the framework leaves open the issue of how important these semantic influences are in skilled oral reading....

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  • ...Lexicalanalogy theories (Henderson, 1982; Marcel, 1980) dispense with the sublexical procedure, and propose that the lexical procedure can pronounce nonwords by synthesizing the pronunciations of orthographically similar words....

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Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: In this paper, a simple view of reading was outlined that consisted of two components, decoding and linguistic comprehension, both held to be necessary for skilled reading, and three predictions drawn from the simple view were assessed in a longitudinal sample of English-Spanish bilingual children in first through fourth grade.
Abstract: A simple view of reading was outlined that consisted of two components, decoding and linguistic comprehension, both held to be necessary for skilled reading. Three predictions drawn from the simple view were assessed in a longitudinal sample of English-Spanish bilingual children in first through fourth grade. The results supported each prediction: (a) The linear combination of decoding and listening comprehension made substantial contributions toward explaining variation in reading comprehension, but the estimates were significantly improved by inclusion of the product of the two components; (b) the correlations between decoding and listening comprehension tended to become negative as samples were successively restricted to less skilled readers; and (c) the pattern of linear relationships between listening and reading comprehension for increasing levels of decoding skill revealed constant intercept values of zero and positive slope values increasing in magnitude. These results support the view that skill in reading can be simply characterized as the product of skill in decoding and linguistic comprehension. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the simple view for the practice of reading instruction, the definition of reading disability, and the notion of literacy.

2,274 citations


Cites background from "Orthography and Word Recognition in..."

  • ...reading, such being augmented, as practice accumulates, by a more direct graphemically-based system (for a review, see Henderson 1982 )....

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Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: The authors introduced a regression-based logic for comparing the cognitive profiles of children developing reading skills at different rates, which is analogous to the reading-level match design, but without some of the methodological problems of that design.
Abstract: In this study, we introduce a new analytic strategy for comparing the cognitive profiles of children developing reading skills at different rates: a regression-based logic that is analogous to the reading-level match design, but one without some of the methodological problems of that design. It provides a unique method for examining whether the reading subskill profiles of poor readers with aptitude/achievement discrepancy differ from those without discrepancy. Children were compared on a varied set of phonological, orthographic, memory, and language processing tasks. The results indicated that cognitive differences between these 2 groups of poor readers all reside outside of the word recognition module

1,311 citations


Additional excerpts

  • ...The issue of spelling–sound regularity or consistency is a complex one that has spawned voluminous research (Brown, 1987; Henderson, 1982, 1985; Humphreys & Evett, 1985; Kay & Bishop, 1987; Patterson, Marshall, & Coltheart, 1985; Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989; Rosson, 1985; Seidenberg, Waters, Barnes, & Tanenhaus, 1984; Venezky & Massaro, 1987)....

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Journal Article•DOI•
TL;DR: The idea that a sensory input can give rise to semantic activation without concomitant conscious identification was the central thesis of the controversial research in subliminal perception as discussed by the authors, which can be demonstrated by the ability of a person to perform discriminations on the basis of the meaning of the stimulus.
Abstract: When the stored representation of the meaning of a stimulus is accessed through the processing of a sensory input it is maintained in an activated state for a certain amount of time that allows for further processing. This semantic activation is generally accompanied by conscious identification, which can be demonstrated by the ability of a person to perform discriminations on the basis of the meaning of the stimulus. The idea that a sensory input can give rise to semantic activation without concomitant conscious identification was the central thesis of the controversial research in subliminal perception. Recently, new claims for the existence of such phenomena have arisen from studies in dichotic listening, parafoveal vision, and visual pattern masking. Because of the fundamental role played by these types of experiments in cognitive psychology, the new assertions have raised widespread interest.The purpose of this paper is to show that this enthusiasm may be premature. Analysis of the three new lines of evidence for semantic activation without conscious identification leads to the following conclusions. (1) Dichotic listening cannot provide the conditions needed to demonstrate the phenomenon. These conditions are better fulfilled in parafoveal vision and are realized ideally in pattern masking. (2) Evidence for the phenomenon is very scanty for parafoveal vision, but several tentative demonstrations have been reported for pattern masking. It can be shown, however, that none of these studies has included the requisite controls to ensure that semantic activation was not accompanied by conscious identification of the stimulus at the time of presentation. (3) On the basis of current evidence it is most likely that these stimuli were indeed consciously identified.

1,143 citations


Cites methods from "Orthography and Word Recognition in..."

  • ...unconscious priming has been promptly integrated into current conceptions of information processing by some authors (e.g., Allport 1980; Henderson 1982)....

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