A Dual-Route Model that Learns to Pronounce English Words

This paper describes a model that learns to pronounce English words. Learning occurs in two modules: 1) a rule-based module that constructs pronunciations by phonetic analysis of the letter string, and 2) a whole-word module that learns to associate subsets of letters to the pronunciation, without phonetic analysis. In a simulation on a corpus of over 300 words the model produced pronunciation latencies consistent with the effects of word frequency and orthographic regularity observed in human data. Implications of the model for theories of visual word processing and reading instruction are discussed.