Overcrowding in semantic neighborhoods: Modeling deep dyslexia

Deep dyslexic (DD) readers produce semantic errors during word naming and are impaired at nonword naming. Previous models of DD have explained this co-occurrence of deficits by postulating damage to both lexical and nonlexical pathways in the reading system. Buchanan, Hildebrandt and MacKinnon (1994) offered an alternative explanation that resulted in the prediction that words with several semantic and phonological neighbors would be read with less success by DDs than would words with few neighbors. This paper briefly describes a test of the semantic neighborhood hypothesis using HAL, a computational model of semantic space developed by Lund and Burgess (in press).