Kapnoula, E. 1, 2, 3 , Protopapas, A. 1, 4 , Saunders, S. 5 & Coltheart, M. 5
1 National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
2 University of Iowa
3 Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language
4 University of Oslo
5 Macquarie University
The Dual Route Cascaded (DRC) model of visual word recognition and reading aloud was modified to process polysyllabic Greek words and nonwords. The Greek DRC performed a naming and a lexical decision task on a set of 150 word and 150 nonword items, spanning a wide range of several sublexical variables (e.g., length, frequency, and syllable frequency). Key predictor variables were largely decorrelated, which allowed dissociation of the effects. The same tasks were performed by 132 native speakers of Greek. The model pronounced correctly all items and simulated some aspects of the behavioral pattern, showing sensitivity to word frequency, and nonword length and bigram frequency. However, in contrast to native speakers of Greek, the model did not demonstrate sensitivity to word length and syllable frequency. These results are useful in constraining and evaluating models of visual word recognition.