Читать книгу The Science of Reading - Группа авторов - Страница 44

Many studies have examined children and adults’ ability to read aloud novel letter strings such as nust and mave. This task provides information about readers’ knowledge of spelling‐sound correspondences and their ability to generalize beyond the words they already know. This ability is particularly important for beginning readers, for whom every letter string is initially novel. Generating the pronunciation (or covert phonological code) of an unfamiliar letter string can allow it to be recognized via its spoken form, an important mechanism in learning to read (Share, 1995). Nonword pronunciation may seem artificial, but it taps into the same knowledge and processes that are used in everyday reading.

The bases of our ability to generalize are an important issue in cognition. For many years, generalization was taken as the primary evidence that linguistic knowledge consists of rules (Pinker, 1994). Generalization – pronouncing novel letter strings – is the principal motivation for the grapheme‐phoneme correspondence rules (GPCs) in dual‐route models. If people lacked this capacity, the lexical route would suffice because words could simply be memorized. Whereas the ability to generate the past tense of a nonword such as wug was taken as evidence for a linguistic rule (Berko, 1958), the ability to pronounce it was taken as evidence for GPCs. The connectionist approach offered a novel account of generalization (Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986), a major theoretical advance. A neural network is trained to perform a task based on exposure to examples. The knowledge encoded by the network can then produce correct output for novel (untrained) items (see Seidenberg & Plaut, 2006, 2014, for reviews).

The GPCs in the Coltheart et al. (2001) model were handcrafted to produce plausible pronunciations of nonwords and so unsurprisingly they produced accurate pronunciations on the items that were tested. However, the model’s nonword performance deviates from people’s when other phenomena are examined. Here, we briefly summarize issues in three areas: 1) consistency effects for nonwords; 2) relative difficulty of word and nonword naming; and 3) length effects for words and nonwords.