Modelling reading development through phonological decoding and self-teaching: implications for dyslexia

作者:Ziegler Johannes C*; Perry Conrad; Zorzi Marco
来源:Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences, 2014, 369(1634): 20120397.
DOI:10.1098/rstb.2012.0397

摘要

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 %26apos;built-in teacher%26apos;. 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 %26apos;external%26apos; 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.

  • 出版日期2014-1-19