Visual word recognition: evidence for strategic control of lexical and nonlexical routines in oral reading

The spelling–sound correspondences in written Persian are always consistent, but some of the words include vowels as a fixed part of their spelling (phonologically transparent words), whereas for other words the vowels are typically not specified (phonologically opaque words). Two speeded naming studies show that semantic relatedness and word frequency affect performance (a) on both classes of words when the context excludes nonwords, and (b) affects opaque words but not transparent words when nonwords form part of the context. A further study shows that (a) transparent words yield word frequency effects when nonwords are absent from the context, and (b) the frequency effect disappears when nonwords form part of the context. The data favor a flexible multiple route model of word recognition whose operation is inconsistent with both the orthographic depth hypothesis and the definitional facts of parallel distributed processing.