ABSTRACT
One influential view about the attentional demands of the reading processes maintains that phonological assembly is less automatic and more attention-demanding than phonological retrieval. The strongest evidence is this respect is the release-from-competition (RFC) effect (Paap & Noel, 1991), in which the pronunciation of low frequency exception words is speeded when participants have to perform a concurrent memory task. However, the results of follow-up investigations have led to a sharp controversy regarding whether the phenomenon is real and whether it can be replicated or not. The debate has reached stalemate, partly because the discussion about architectural and processing assumptions has been carried out only in verbal terms. This paper investigates the RFC phenomenon through simulations with two computational models of reading, the Connectionist Dual-Process model (Zorzi et al., 1998) and the DRC model (Coltheart et al., 1993). Both models failed to reproduce the RFC effect, even when the specific assumptions made by Paap and Noel were accurately implemented in the simulations. This finding casts further doubts about the reality of the phenomenon.
