ABSTRACT

The paradigm of connectionism, which is increasingly influential in cognitive psychology, has led to computer simulations in which a single computational procedure is applied to all words, regular or irregular, and real words or nonwords. Words are not represented as entries in a lexicon, but rather in terms of weights or connections between the orthographic input unit and hidden units, and between hidden units and phonological output units in a distributed memory network. The multiple connections model is also grounded in four general principles of developmental psychobiology: normal variation, alternative pathways, redundancy, and critical developmental periods. The matrix of connection weights resulting from crosstalk reflects the continuous, rather than categorical, orthographic-phonological covariance of the language. According to the dual route theory, there are two independent and noninteractive routes for reading single words: the direct route, which is used to read phonically irregular words, and the indirect route, which is used to read phonically regular words.