ABSTRACT
Learning to recognize and pronounce words is among the first tasks confronting the beginning reader; developmental dyslexia is typically associated with deficits in this domain. The investigations of developmental and acquired forms of dyslexia represent a novel approach to understanding disordered cognition. Developmental disorders are seen as deriving from abnormalities in the initial configuration of the model or in the learning algorithm; disorders following brain injury result from damage to the normal system. One of the main issues in reading research concerns the role of phonological information in the access of meaning. The Seidenberg and McClelland model incorporates the idea of two parallel computations of meaning; however, the different processes can jointly contribute to the activation of distributed semantic representations. The model accounts for effects of lexical frequency because frequency determines how often a word is presented during the training phase; words that are presented more often have a bigger impact on the weights.
