Using Parallel Distributed Processing Models to Simulate Phonological Dyslexia: The Key Role of Plasticity-related Recovery

Abstract

PMSP96 [Plaut, D. C., McClelland, J. L., Seidenberg, M. S., & Patterson, K. Understanding normal and impaired word reading: Computational principles in quasi-regular domains. Psychological Review, 103, 56-115, 1996, Simulation 4] is an implementation of the triangle model of reading, which was able to simulate effects found in normal and surface dyslexic readers. This study replicated the original findings and explored the possibility that damage to the phonological portion of the model might produce symptoms of phonological dyslexia. The first simulation demonstrated that this implementation of PMSP96 was able to reproduce the standard effects of reading, and that when damaged by removal of the semantic input to phonology, it produced the kind of frequency/consistency interactions and regularization errors typical of surface dyslexia. The second simulation explored the effect of phonological damage. Phonological damage alone did not result in a convincing simulation of phonological dyslexia. However, when the damage was followed by a period of recovery, the network was able to simulate large lexicality and imageability effects characteristic of phonological dyslexia-the first time that both surface and phonological dyslexia have been simulated in the same parallel distributed processing network. This result supports the view that plasticity-related changes should be a significant factor in our understanding of chronic behavioral dissociations.