We develop a connectionist approach to processing in quasi-regular domains, as exemplified by English word reading. A consideration of the shortcomings of a previous implementation (Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989, Psych. Rev.) in reading nonwords leads to the development of orthographic and phonological representations that capture better the relevant structure among the written and spoken forms of words. In a number of simulation experiments, networks using the new representations learn to read both regular and exception words, including low-frequency exception words, and yet are still able to read pronounceable nonwords as well as skilled readers. A mathematical analysis of the effects of word frequency and spelling-sound consistency in a related but simpler system serves to clarify the close relationship of these factors in influencing naming latencies. These insights are verified in subsequent simulations, including an attractor network that reproduces the naming latency data directly in its time to settle on a response. Further analyses of the network's ability to reproduce data on impaired reading in surface dyslexia support a view of the reading system that incorporates a graded division-of-labor between semantic and phonological processes. Such a view is consistent with the more general Seidenberg and McClelland framework and has some similarities with---but also important differences from---the standard dual-route account.

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Developmental psychology and developmental neuropsychology have traditionally focused on the study of children. But these two fields are also supposed to be about the study of change, i.e. changes in behavior, changes in the neural structures that underlie behavior, and changes in the relationship between mind and brain across the course of development. Ironically, there has been relatively little interest in the mechanisms responsible for change in the last 15–20 years of developmental research. The reasons for this de-emphasis on change have a great deal to do with a metaphor for mind and brain that has influenced most of experimental psychology, cognitive science and neuropsychology for the last few decades, i.e. the metaphor of the serial digital computer. We will refer to this particu-

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The proposition that the mental lexicon is a `dual route' system, advanced by Pinker and others to account for regular and irregular morphology, overlooks the important fact that morphological regularity correlates inversely with phonological regularity --`regular' past-tense beeped being phonologically irregular (exceptional syllable), while `irregular' past-tense kept is phonologically just regular. I argue that the correlation, which is general, can only be captured under a single-rather than `dual'- architecture, and an associational-rather than rule based- theory of morphology. Where morphological associations are strong, morphology looks regular and phonological alternations are inhibited, making phonology look irregular. In a system in which regularities are attributed to `rules', rules should be able to coexist with other rules, and morphological and phonological regularities should correlate directly, rather than inversely. 1.

Constructivism is the Piagetian notion that learning leads the child to develop new types of representations. For example, on the Piagetian view, a child is born without knowing that objects persist in time even when they are occluded; through a process of learning, the child comes to know that objects persist in time. The trouble with this view has always been the lack of a concrete, computational account of how a learning mechanism could lead to such a change. Recently, however, in a book entitled Rethinking Innateness, Elman et al. (Elman,

The representation of regular morphological processes has been the subject of much controversy, particularly in the debate between single and dual route models of morphology.

Some theories of visual word recognition postulate that there is a level of processing or representation at which morphemes are treated differently from whole words. Support for these theories has been derived from priming experiments in which the recognition of a target word is facilitated by the prior presentation of a morphologicallyrelatedprime (departure-DEPART). In English, such facilitation could be due to morphological relatedness, or to some combination of the orthographic and semantic relatedness characteristic of derivationally related words. We report two sets of visual priming experiments in which the morphological, semantic, and orthographic relationships between primes and targets are varied in three SOA conditions (43 ms, 72 ms, and 230 ms). Results showed that morphological structure plays a signi�cant role in the early visual recognition of English words that is independent of both semantic and orthographic relatedness. Findings are discussed in terms of current approaches to morphological processing. Requests for reprints should be addressed to Kathleen Rastle, Department of Experimental

inherently graded.