Connectionism, phonology, reading, and regularity in developmental dyslexia

Tests of the ''phonological deficit'' account of developmental dyslexia have produced apparently inconsistent results. We show how a connectionist approach to dyslexic reading development can resolve the paradox. A ''dyslexic'' model of reading was created by reducing the quality of the phonological representations available to the model during learning. The model behaved similarly to dyslexic children in that it had a selectively reduced ability to process nonwords, but showed normal effects of words' spelling-to-sound regularity. An experimental test of the model's predictions confirmed that dyslexic children perform similarly, in that they are impaired on irregular words to the same extent as nondyslexic children. It is concluded that developmentally dyslexic reading can indeed be understood in terms of impaired phonological representations and that the adoption of a modeling approach resolves an apparent paradox in the experimental literature. (C) 1997 Academic Press.