Parallel vs Serial Issues in Reading Aloud: Evidence for Parallel Processing from a Computational Model of Japanese Kanji & Kana Nonword Reading

Lower nonword reading performance in the old version of parallel-distributed processing models in English was taken as evidence for the necessity of sequential components in reading aloud, but the later updates have resolved this issue without discarding the parallel processing principle. A model’s validity can be tested by cross-script extensions. On this point, an extension to Japanese kanji reading has posed a question. Specifically, the latest Japanese connectionist model has incorporated a sequential component in order to improve kanji nonword reading performance. The present study, however, proposed an alternative, fully parallel-distributed processing model to map distributed kanji and kana visual representations to phonemic/moraic representations, with satisfactory nonword reading performance. First crosslinguistic evidence from Japanese is provided to support a single-mechanism theory that postulates parallel-processing for both words and nonwords reading.