An Extension of a Parallel-Distributed Processing Framework of Reading Aloud in Japanese: Human Nonword Reading Accuracy Does Not Require a Sequential Mechanism.
Humans can pronounce a nonword (e.g., rint). Some researchers have interpreted this behavior as requiring a sequential mechanism by which a grapheme-phoneme correspondence rule is applied to each grapheme in turn. However, several parallel-distributed processing (PDP) models in English have simulated human nonword reading accuracy without a sequential mechanism. Interestingly, the Japanese psycholinguistic literature went partly in the same direction, but it has since concluded that a sequential parsing mechanism is required to reproduce human nonword reading accuracy. In this study, by manipulating the list composition (i.e., pure word/nonword list vs. mixed list), we demonstrated that past psycholinguistic studies in Japanese have overestimated human nonword reading accuracy. When the more fairly reevaluated human performance was targeted, a newly implemented Japanese PDP model simulated the target accuracy as well as the error patterns. These findings suggest that PDP models are a more parsimonious way of explaining reading across various languages.
Department of Psychology, Nagoya University.
Kenji
K
Ikeda
Department of Psychology, Nagoya University.|Psychology Department, University of York.|Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences.
Taiji
T
Ueno
Department of Psychology, Nagoya University.|Japan Society for the Promotion of Sciences.
Yuichi
Y
Ito
Department of Psychology, Nagoya University.
Shinji
S
Kitagami
Department of Psychology, Nagoya University.
Jun
J
Kawaguchi
D006801:Humans; D007564:Japan; D007802:Language; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011932:Reading; D013060:Speech; D014825:Vocabulary
Nonword reading; Parallel distributed processing; Reading; Serial processing