Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We present a new connectionist model of human spelling and investigate some of its properties. Although based on Sejnowski & Rosenberg's (1987) NETtalk model of reading, it requires no pre-processing of the training data to align the phonemes and letters. The model achieves 100% performance on the training data (2837 monosyllabic words including many irregular words) and has a generalization performance of about 89%. Under appropriate conditions it exhibits symptoms similar to developmental surface dyslexia and acquired surface dysgraphia. However, its inability to account for phonological dysgraphia and lexical decision leads us to believe that it is a promising candidate for the rule based part of a dual route model but not a complete model of spelling on its own.