title: Modelling reading development through phonological decoding and self-teaching: implications for dyslexia.
abstract: The most influential theory of learning to read is based on the idea that children rely on phonological decoding skills to learn novel words. According to the self-teaching hypothesis, each successful decoding encounter with an unfamiliar word provides an opportunity to acquire word-specific orthographic information that is the foundation of skilled word recognition. Therefore, phonological decoding acts as a self-teaching mechanism or 'built-in teacher'. However, all previous connectionist models have learned the task of reading aloud through exposure to a very large corpus of spelling-sound pairs, where an 'external' teacher supplies the pronunciation of all words that should be learnt. Such a supervised training regimen is highly implausible. Here, we implement and test the developmentally plausible phonological decoding self-teaching hypothesis in the context of the connectionist dual process model. In a series of simulations, we provide a proof of concept that this mechanism works. The model was able to acquire word-specific orthographic representations for more than 25 000 words even though it started with only a small number of grapheme-phoneme correspondences. We then show how visual and phoneme deficits that are present at the outset of reading development can cause dyslexia in the course of reading development.
authors: Laboratoire de Psychologie Cognitive, Aix-Marseille University and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Fédération de Recherche 3C, Brain and Language Research Institute, , 3 place Victor Hugo, 13331 Marseille, France.
authors: Johannes C
authors: JC
authors: Ziegler
authors: Conrad
authors: C
authors: Perry
authors: Marco
authors: M
authors: Zorzi
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D003198:Computer Simulation; D004410:Dyslexia / Q000503:physiopathology*; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008960:Models, Psychological; D011932:Reading; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology*; D014706:Verbal Learning / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: computational modelling; developmental dyslexia; phonological decoding; reading development