Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Reading acquisition primarily relies on orthographic learning. Behavioral studies show that familiarity with a novel word's pronunciation facilitates learning, particularly in semantically meaningful contexts. Two main components of orthographic learning are commonly described: perceptual processing of the visual stimulus, to infer corresponding phonological rep- resentations, and “pronunciation correction”, to correct errors from perceptual processing. Currently, pronunciation correc- tion has not been featured in reading acquisition computa- tional models. This study uses BRAID-Acq, a reading ac- quisition model, to implement and compare two pronunciation correction mechanisms (an “online” and a “post-processing” variant). We simulated learning of words with and without prior phonological knowledge and explored the impact of con- text strength and size on learning. Results indicate that both mechanisms improve decoding. However, the post-processing mechanism induced implausible lexicalization for words with- out prior phonological knowledge, while the online mecha- nism did not. Overall, our simulation results suggest that pro- nunciation correction could be construed as an online process.