Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Learning to read has a substantial effect on the representationsof spoken and meaning forms of words. In this paper weassess literacy effects beyond representational changes,focusing on adaptations to the architecture of the readingsystem that maps between these representations. We present aconnectionist model of reading that predicted distinctprocessing of pre- and post-literacy acquired words. Forreading for meaning, words learned prior to literacy wereprocessed more indirectly via phonological representations,whereas for post-literacy acquired words, processing wasmore direct along the orthography to semantics pathway. Thismore computationally intensive route was prioritised becauseindirect phonology to semantics mappings were unavailable.Such an effect was less apparent for naming, because learningdirect orthography to phonology mappings is lesscomputationally intensive. These results were confirmed in ananalysis of naming and lexical decision behavioural data. Theeffect of literacy onset remains an observable artefact in adultreading.