models it inspired are computational versions of the box‐and‐arrow approach. As before, the goal is to account for as many phenomena as possible. The “gold standard” studies function like the brain‐injured patients with highly selective impairments. The parameter settings that allowed an effect to be reproduced had no independent justification, nor do the detailed assumptions about the sequence of events in generating a pronunciation or making a lexical decision. The goal of the connectionist approach, in contrast, was to identify general properties of knowledge representation, learning, and processing which, when applied in domains such as reading aloud or generating the past tense, would yield behavior that aligned well with people’s. The properties that were identified have turned out to have lasting value, yielding novel insights about old questions and opening new ones for scientific study.
At the outset we observed that “Visual word recognition is one of the great success stories in modern cognitive science and neuroscience.” Is the claim valid? All of the models we have discussed address a limited range of reading phenomena. The goal of implementing models that simulate the results of individual studies may well have been over‐ambitious; behavior is affected by factors outside the scope of such models (e.g., measurement and sampling error). Many issues, such as the roles of different types of learning, remain to be addressed. Pursuit of the two types of models has nonetheless deepened understanding of many aspects of reading, including ones discussed elsewhere in this volume. The high level of convergence between theories that has occurred is itself indicative of progress in this vigorous area of research.
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by The Vilas Trust and Deinlein Language and Literacy Fund (University of Wisconsin‐Madison). We have greatly benefited from discussions of these issues with many people over the years, especially David Plaut, Anna Woollams, Karalyn Patterson, Jay McClelland, Matt Lambon Ralph, and Maryellen MacDonald. Details concerning the modeling results mentioned in the article are available on the Open Science Framework website, https://osf.io/ay7h6/.
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