Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A model of the productive sound-spelling mapping in English is described, based on previous work on the analogous problem for reading (Zorzi, Houghton & Butterworth, 1998a, 1998b). It is found that a two-layer network can robustly extract this mapping from a representative corpus of English monosyllabic sound-spelling pairs, but that good performance requires the use of graphemic representations. Performance of the model is discussed for both words and nonwords, direct comparison being made with the spelling of surface dysgraphic MP (Behrmann & Bub, 1992). The model shows appropriate contextual effects on spelling and exactly reproduces many of the subject's spellings. Effects of sound-spelling consistency are examined, and results arising from the interaction of this system with a lexical spelling system are compared with normal subject data.