A strong phonological theory of reading is proposed and discussed. The first claim of this article is that current debates on word recognition are often based on different axioms regarding the cognitive structures of the mental lexicon rather than conflicting empirical evidence. These axioms lead to different interpretations of the same data. It is argued that once the implicit axioms of competing theories in visual word recognition are explicated, a strong phonological model presents a viable and coherent approach. The assumptions underlying a strong phonological theory of reading are outlined, and 4 theoretical questions are examined: Is phonological recoding a mandatory phase of print processing? Is phonology necessary for lexical access? Is phonology necessary for accessing meaning? How can phonology be derived from orthographic structure? These issues are integrated into a general theory that is constrained by all of the findings.

Statistical learning is typically considered to be a domain-general mechanism by which cognitive systems discover the underlying distributional properties of the input. Recent studies examining whether there are commonalities in the learning of distributional information across different domains or modalities consistently reveal, however, modality and stimulus specificity. An important question is, therefore, how and why a hypothesized domain-general learning mechanism systematically produces such effects. We offer a theoretical framework according to which statistical learning is not a unitary mechanism, but a set of domain-general computational principles, that operate in different modalities and therefore are subject to the specific constraints characteristic of their respective brain regions. This framework offers testable predictions and we discuss its computational and neurobiological plausibility.

We investigated the psychological reality ofthe concept of orthographical depth and its influence on visual word recognition by examining naming performance in Hebrew, English, and Serbo-Croatian. We ran three sr of experiments in which we used native speakers and identical experimental methods in each language. Experiment 1 revealed that the lexical status ofthe stimulus (high-frequency words, low-frequency words, and nonwords) significantly affected naming in Hebrew (the deepest of the three orthographies). This effect was only moderate in English and nonsignificant in Serbo-Croatian (the shallowest of the three orthographies). Moreover, only in Hebrew did lexical status have similar effects on naming and lexical decision performance. Experiment 2 revealed that semantic priming effects in naming were larger in Hebrew than in English and completely absent in Serbo-Croatian. Experiment 3 revealed that a large proportion of nonlexical tokens (nonwords) in the stimulus list affects naming words in Hebrew and in English, but not in Serbo-Croatian. These resuits were interpreted as strong support for the orthographical depth hypothesis and suggest, in general, that in shallow orthographies phonology is generated dirr from print, whereas in deep orthographies phonology is derived from the internal lexicon.of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memo~ and Cognition, 8,[385][386][387][388][389][390][391][392][393][394][395][396][397][398][399]

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