Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

It is sometimes claimed that interactive-activation models are too powerful, and that it is difficult to constrain them adequately. I illustrate this problem by showing that the basic interactive-activation architecture has several different possible sources for effects of spelling-to-sound regularity on word naming. I then show how data can constrain the architecture. New data lead to a rather different and more constrained version of the interactive-activation model to account for spelling-to-sound conversion. Analysis of the errors made by patients suffering from acquired surface dyslexia confirms the predictions of the constrained model. It is concluded that the traditional interactive activation framework must be considerably constrained to account for normal and disturbed word naming.