Abstract
Connectionist models of reading, in particular Seidenberg and McClelland's (1989) parallel distributed processing model of word recognition, are described and contrasted with the top-down, bottom-up, and interactive models of reading from the traditional, symbol-manipulation paradigm of information processing. Connectionism emphasizes: (1) a single, rather than dual, mechanism for processing words, and (2) distributed representations and weighted connections between units rather than symbolic rules for mapping letters and sounds. Implications for the teaching of reading are discussed.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adams, M. J. (1990).Beginning to Read, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Baron, J., and Strawson, C. (1976). Use of orthographic and word-specific knowledge in reading words aloud.J. Exp. Psychol.: Hum. Percept. Perform. 2: 386–393.
Bechtel, W., and Abrahamsen, D. (1991).Connectionism and the Mind, Backwell, Cambridge, MA.
Bereiter, C. (1991). Implications of connectionism for thinking about rules.Educ. Res. 20: 10–16.
Bradley, L., and Bryant, P. E. (1979). The independence of reading and spelling in backward and normal readers.Devel. Med. Child Neurol. 21: 504–514.
Bradley, L., and Bryant, P. E. (1985).Rhyme and Reason in Reading and Spelling, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, MI.
Bryk, A. S., and Raudenbush, S. W. (1992).Hierarchical Linear Models, Sage Publications, Newbury Park, CA.
Byrne, B. (1992). Studies in the acquisition procedure for reading: Rationale, hypotheses, and data. In Gough, P. B., Ehri, L. C., and Treiman, R. (eds.),Reading Acquisition, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 1–34.
Cazden, C. (1992).Whole Language Plus, Teachers College Press, NY.
Chall, J. (1967).Learning to Read: The Great Debate, McGraw-Hill, NY.
Chall, J. (1983).Stages of Reading Development, McGraw-Hill, NY.
Clay, M. (1985).The Early Detection of Reading Difficulties (3rd Ed.), Heinemann Educational Books. Portsmouth, NH.
Clymer, T. (1963). The utility of phonic generalizations in the primary grades.Reading Teacher 16: 252–258.
Coltheart, M. (1978). Lexical access in simple reading tasks. In Underwood, G. (ed.),Strategies of Information Processing, Academic Press, NY.
Coltheart, M., Curtis, B., Atkins, P., and Haller, M. (1993). Models of reading aloud: Dual-route and parallel-distributed-processing approaches.Psychol. Rev. 100: 589–608.
DeFord, D. E., Lyons, C. A., and Pinnell, G. S. (1991) (eds.)Bridges to Literacy: Learning from Reading Recovery, Heinemann, Portsmouth, NH.
Dennett, D. (1991).Consciousness Explained, Little, Brown & Co., Boston, MA.
Ehri, L. C. (in press). Development of the ability to read words: Update. In Ruddell, R., Ruddell, M., and Singer, H. (eds.),Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading. IRA, Newark, Delaware.
Ehri, L. C. (1992). Reconceptualizing the development of sight word reading and its relationship to recoding. In Gough, P. B., Ehri, L. C., and Treiman, R. (eds.),Reading Acquisition, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 107–144.
Englemann, S., and Bruner, E. C. (1983).Reading Mastery I and II: DISTAR Reading, Science Research Associates, Chicago, IL.
Frith, U. (1985). Beneath the surface of developmental dyslexia. In Pattern, K. E., Marshall, J. C., and Coltheart, M. (eds.),Surface Dyslexia, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 301–330.
Foorman, B. R., Francis, D. J., Novy, D. M., and Liberman, D. (1991). How letter-sound instruction mediates progress in first-grade reading and spelling.J. Educ. Psychol. 83: 456–469.
Foorman, B. R., Jenkins, L., and Francis, D. J. (1993). Links among segmenting, spelling, and reading words in first and second grades.Reading Writing 5: 1–17.
Gibson, E. J., and Levin, H. (1975).The Psychology of Reading, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Glushko, R. J. (1979). The organization and activation of orthographic knowledge in reading aloud.J. Exp. Psychol.: Hum. Percept. Perform. 5: 674–691.
Goodman, K. S. (1970). Reading: A psycholinguistic guessing game. In Singer, H., and Ruddell, R. B. (eds.),Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading, International Reading Association, Newark, DE.
Goswami, U. (1986). Children's use of analogy in learning to read: A developmental study.J. Exp. Child Psychol. 42: 73–83.
Goswami, U., and Bryant, P. E. (1990).Phonological Skills and Learning to Read, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ.
Gough, P. B. (1972). One second of reading. In Kavanagh, J. F., and Mattingly, I. G. (eds.),Language by Ear and by Eye, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 331–358.
Gough, P. B., and Hillinger, M. L. (1980). Learning to read: An unnatural act.Bull. Orton Soc. 30: 179–196.
Gough, P. B., and Tunmer, W. E. (1986). Decoding, reading, and reading disability.Remed. Spec. Educ. 7: 6–10.
Gough, P. B., Juel, C., and Griffith, P. (1992). Reading, spelling, and the orthographic cipher. In Gough, P. B., Ehri, L. C., and Treiman, R. (eds.),Reading Acquisition, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 35–48.
Haskell, D. W., Foorman, B. R., and Swank, P. (1992). Effects of three orthographic/phonological units on first-grade reading.Remed. Spec. Educ. 13: 40–49.
Hinton, G. E., and Sallice, T. (1989). Lesioning a Connectionist Network: Investigations of Acquired Dyslexia. Technical Report CRG-TR-89-3, University of Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Holyoak, K. J. (1991). Symbolic connectionism: Toward third-generation theories of expertise. In Ericsson, K. A., and Smith, J. (eds.),Toward a General Theory of Expertise, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK.
Juel, C. (1990). Beginning reading. In Barr, R., Kamil, M. L., Mosenthal, P., and Pearson, R. D. (eds.),Handbook of Reading Research, (Vol. 2), Longman, New York, pp. 759–788.
Jusczyk, P. W., and Bertoncini, J. (1988). Viewing the development of speech perception as an innately guided learning process.Lang. Speech 31: 217–238.
Just, M. A., and Carpenter, P. A. (1980). A theory of reading: From eye fixations to comprehension.Psychol. Rev. 87: 329–354.
Kimura, Y., and Bryant, P. E. (1983). Reading and writing in English and Japanese.Brit. J. Devel. Psychol. 1: 129–144.
Kucera, H., and Francis, W. N. (1967).Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English, Brown University Press, Providence, RI.
Lundberg, I., Frost, J., and Peterson, O. (1988). Effects of an extensive program for stimulating phonological awareness in pre-school children.Reading Res. Quart. 23: 263–284.
MacWhinney, B., Leinbach, J., Taraban, R., and McDonald, J. (1989). Language learning: Cues or rules?J. Memory Lang. 28: 255–277.
McClelland, J. L., & Rumelhart, D. E. (1981). An interactive activation model of context effects in letter perception: Part 1, An account of basic findings.Psychol. Rev. 88: 375–407.
Perfetti, C. A. (1985).Reading Ability, Oxford University Press, NY.
Perfetti, C. A. (1991). Representations and awareness in the acquisition of reading competence. In Rieben, L., and Perfetti, C. A. (eds.),Learning to Read: Basic Research and Its Implications, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ.
Perfetti, C. A., Beck, I., Bell, L., and Hughes, C. (1987). Phonemic knowledge and learning to read are reciprocal: A longitudinal study of first grade children.Merrill-Palmer Quart. 33: 283–319.
Petitto, L. A. (1987). On the autonomy of language and gesture: Evidence from the acquisition of personal pronouns in American Sign Language.Cognition 27: 1–52.
Petitto, L. A., and Marentette, P. F. (1991). Babbling in the manual mode: Evidence for the ontogeny of language.Science 251: 1493–1496.
Pinker, S., and Mehler, J. (eds.) (1988). Connectionism and symbol systems: Special edition.Cognition 28.
Pinker, S., and Prince, A. (1988). On language and connectionism: Analysis of a parallel distributed processing model of language acquisition.Cognition 28: 73–194.
Rayner, K., and Pollatsek, A. (1989).The Psychology of Reading, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ.
Rumelhart, D. E. (1977). Toward an interactive model of reading. In Dornic, S. (ed.),Attention and Performance VI, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 573–603.
Rumelhart, D. E. (1989). The architecture of mind: A connectionist approach. In Posner, M. I. (ed.),Foundations of Cognitive Science, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 133–159.
Rumelhart, D. E., and McClelland, J. L. (1986). On learning the past tenses of English verbs. In McClelland, J. L., and Rumelhart, D. E. (eds.),Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition (Vol. 2), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 216–271.
Rumelhart, D. E., Hinton, G. E., and Williams, R. J. (1986). Learning internal representations by error propagation. In Rumelhart, D. E., and McClelland, J. L. (eds.),Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition (Vol. 1), MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 318–362.
Schneider, W., and Graham, D. J. (1992). Introduction to connectionist modeling in education.Educ. Psychol. 27: 513–530.
Seidenberg, M. (1990). Lexical access: Another theoretical soupstone? In Balota, D. A., Flores D'Arcais, G. B., and Rayner, K. (eds.),Comprehension Processes in Reading, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 33–72.
Seidenberg, M. (1992). Dyslexia in a computational model of word recognition in reading. In Gough, P. B., Ehri, L. C., and Treiman, R. (eds.),Reading Acquisition, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 243–274.
Seidenberg, M., and McClelland, J. L. (1989). A distributed, developmental model of word recognition and naming.Psychol. Rev. 96: 523–568.
Seidenberg, M. S., Bruck, M., Fornarolo, G., and Backman, J. (1986). Word recognition skills of poor and disabled readers: Do they necessarily differ?Appl. Psycholing. 6: 161–180.
Sejnowski, T. J., and Rosenberg, C. R. (1987). Parallel networks that learn to pronounce English test.Complex Syst. 1: 145–168.
Smith, F. (1971).Understanding Reading: A Psycholinguistic Analysis of Reading and Learning to Read, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, NY.
Soderbergh, R. (1971).Reading in Early Childhood: A Linguistic Study of a Swedish Preschool Child's Gradual Acquisition of Reading Ability, Almgvist and Wiksell, Stockholm.
Stanovich, K. E. (1990). A call for an end to the paradigm wars in reading research.J. Reading Behav. 22: 221–232.
Stanovich, K. E. (1992). Speculations on the causes and consequences of individual differences in early reading acquisition. In Gough, P. B., Ehri, L. C., and Treiman, R. (eds.),Reading Acquisition, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, pp. 307–342.
Stuart, M., and Coltheart, M. (1988). Does reading develop in a sequences of stages?Cognition 30: 139–181.
Treiman, R. A., Freyd, J. J., and Baron, J. (1983). Phonological recoding and use of spelling sound rules in reading of sentences.J. Verb. Learn. Verb. Behav. 22: 682–700.
Van Orden, G. C., Pennington, B. F., and Stone, G. O. (1990). Word identification in reading and the promise of subsymbolic psycholinguistics.Psychol. Rev. 97: 488–522.
Vellutino, F. R. (1991). Introduction to three studies on reading acquisition: Convergent findings on theoretical foundations of code-oriented versus whole-language approaches to reading instruction.J. Educ. Psychol. 83: 437–443.
Wagner, R. K., and Torgesen, J. K. (1987). The nature of phonological processing and its causal role in the acquisition of reading skills.Psychol. Bull. 101: 192–212.
Wickelgren, W. A. (1969). Context-sensitive coding, associative memory, and serial order in (speech) behavior.Psychol. Rev. 76: 1–15.
Wise, B. W. (1992). Whole words and decoding for short-term learning: Comparisons on a “talking-computer” system.J. Exp. Child Psychol. 54: 147–167.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Foorman, B.R. The relevance of a connectionist model of reading for “The great debate”. Educ Psychol Rev 6, 25–47 (1994). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02209023
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02209023