Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this paper w e describe a connectionist model of the development of alphabetic spelling. The model learns to spell regular words more quickly than words with irregular spellings. W h e n the computational resources available to the model are restricted, the model learns more slowly and, analogously to developmental dyslexics, fails to learn some of the irregular items in its vocabulary. Experimental evidence is reported, which shows that both normal and dyslexic children of various ages have difficulty with particular word types that are similar to the problems experienced by the model on the same words. Finally, the model is "lesioned," and its performance is then similar to that of "surface dysgraphics." The good fit between model and data is taken as evidence that, throughout much of the relevant developmental period, the task facing children can be usefully viewed as a statistical one.