Connectionist modelling of surface dyslexia based on foveal splitting: Impaired pronunciation after only two half pints
Year: 2001
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: In cases of surface dyslexia and phonological dyslexia there is a dissociation between the reading of irregular words and nonwords. This dissociation has been captured in connectionist models of dyslexia in terms of impairments to the models’ phonological representations. We report a series of connectionist simulations based on an alternative neuro-anatomically motivated theory that dyslexia is at least partly caused by hemispheric desynchronisation. Problems of interhemispheric transfer affect the mapping between orthography and phonology because the human fovea is precisely vertically split: a fixated word is initially split and the two parts contralaterally projected to the two hemispheres of the brain. Much of lexical processing can be reconstrued as the integration of this information (Shillcock, Ellison & Monaghan, 2000). We demonstrate that the dissociation between the reading of irregular words and nonwords can be understood in terms of a failure to integrate the initially split input.
Authors: Richard Shillcock, Padraic Monaghan
Language: English
Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2623172615