Regularity and Length E®ects in Word Naming: A Test of the Dual Route Cascaded Model

According to some dual-route theories of word nam-ing, an inhibitory e®ect of length is caused by assem-bled phonology. Exception words are read via addressed phonology, and so should be immune from length e®ects. Analyses reported here show, however, that there is an inhibitory length e®ect for both regular and exception words, and this e®ect is no smaller for exception than regular words. The DRC, a computational implementa-tion of dual-route theory, does not produce this pattern, instead showing a facilitatory length e®ect for exception words. This is partially due to the correlation between length and position of irregularity, but length e®ects are predicted to be smaller for exception words than regular words at all positions of irregularity by the DRC, con-trary to the data. This suggests that length e®ects oc-cur at the letter identi¯cation stage and a smaller length e®ect for words than nonwords may be due to length-sensitivity of word superiority e®ects. The dual-route theory of reading (e.g., Monsell, Pat-terson, Graham, Hughes, & Milroy, 1992) proposes that there are two mechanisms for converting print to sound: a lexical route that retrieves known pronunciations (ad-dressed phonology), and a non-lexical route that assem-bles pronunciations from grapheme-phoneme correspon-dences (assembled phonology). These mechanisms com-pete to produce the pronunciation of a written word. Regular words are read equally well by both routes; ex-ception words are only read correctly by the lexical route; and nonwords are read by the non-lexical route. The dual-route cascaded (DRC) model of readin