Revisiting serial position effects in reading

Contrasting predictions of the dual-route and parallel distributed processing models of word recognition were tested in two experiments that investigated the relationship between position of irregularity and plosivity of initial phoneme. In a naming task (Experiment 1), words irregular at the first phoneme position yielded a larger phonological regularity effect than words irregular at die second phoneme position. In addition, the plosivity of the initial phoneme interacted with regularity. For words irregular at the second phoneme position, a regularity effect was observed for plosive-initial words but not for nonplosive-initial words. However, position interacted with regularity regardless of initial-phoneme plosivity. Regularity effects were eliminated in a lexical decision task (Experiment 2), suggesting that the naming results were due to the phonological characteristics of the stimuli. The results support the predictions made by the dual-route cascaded model of Coltheart and Rastle (1994) and challenge current parallel distributed processing accounts, (C) 1998 Academic Press.