On the dominance of whole-word knowledge in reading aloud

The localist dual-route model of visual word recognition assumes a routine that addresses the pronunciation of all words known to the reader (the lexical-semantic pathway) and another routine, operating in parallel, that assembles pronunciations on the basis of sublexical spelling-sound correspondences. The present experiment exploits the exception effect (in which words that are atypical in terms of their spelling-sound correspondences are named more slowly than typical ones) because it is considered a marker of the joint operation of these two routines. Participants named high- and low-frequency regular and exception words that were repeated across two blocks of trials. The widely reported interaction between regularity and word frequency is present in Block 1 but is reduced in magnitude in Block 2. DRC, an implemented dual-route model, simulates the data. Taken in conjunction with other reports, the results provide further evidence for a double dissociation between addressed and assembled routines and are consistent with the view that skill in recognizing printed words known to the reader reflects the dominance of orthographic over phonological processing.