Recent studies suggest that basic effects which are markers of visual word recognition in Indo-European languages cannot be obtained in Hebrew or in Arabic. Although Hebrew has an alphabetic writing system, just like English, French, or Spanish, a series of studies consistently suggested that simple form-orthographic priming, or…

The least supported phoneme refers to the phoneme position within a word with which the fewest phonological neighbors overlap. Recently, it has been argued that the number of neighbors coinciding with the least supported phoneme is a critical determinant of pronunciation latencies. The current research tested this claim by comparing naming…

Is the structure of lexical representations universal, or do languages vary in the fundamental ways in which they represent lexical information? Here, we consider a touchstone case: whether Semitic languages require a special morpheme, the consonantal root. In so doing, we explore a well-known constraint on the location of identical consonants…

Developmental dyslexia was investigated within a well-understood and fully specified computational model of reading aloud: the dual route cascaded model (DRC [Coltheart, M., Rastle, K., Perry, C., Langdon, R., & Ziegler, J.C. (2001). DRC: A dual route cascaded model of visual word recognition and reading aloud. Psychological Review, 108,…

The Shortlist model is presented, which incorporates the desirable properties of earlier models of back-propagation networks with recurrent connections that successfully model many aspects of human spoken word recognition. The new model is entirely bottom-up and can readily perform simulations with vocabularies of tens of thousands of words. (DR)