abstract Kathy Rastle

Kathy Rastle (Royal Holloway, University of London, U.K.)

Moving beyond the monosyllable: Mega-study of disyllabic nonword reading aloud

More than 90% of English words are polysyllabic, yet the vast majority of work on reading aloud has focused on monosyllables. We conducted a large-scale study in which 41 participants read aloud 915 disyllabic pseudowords. Participants’ reading aloud latencies, pronunciations, and stress placements were recorded, and these measures were compared where possible to the performance of rule-based (DRC, Rastle & Coltheart, 2000) and probabilistic (CDP++, Perry et al., 2010; Seva et al., 2009) models of reading. Analyses sought to establish (a) how various properties of the disyllabic pseudowords influenced human and model reading aloud performance; (b) whether stress placement can be predicted by a combination of phonological, orthographic, and morphological cues; and (c) the extent to which pronunciation uncertainty across participants influences human and model reading aloud performance. Implications for extending models of reading to account for polysyllables are discussed.