Dual-Route Word Naming Race

Stimulus

Reader Parameters

Word frequency 70

Processing speed 1.0×

Neural noise

Race Result

Press "Say it aloud" to run a naming trial.

Naming latency

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Winning route

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How it works

Reading a word aloud engages two competing neural pathways — the dual-route model of visual word recognition (Coltheart et al., "DRC model," Psychological Review, 2001), supported by lesion studies of surface and phonological dyslexia:

Non-lexical (sub-lexical) route — orange path. Converts letters to sounds piece-by-piece using grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) rules. Works for any letter string, including nonwords, but always produces a regularized pronunciation.
Lexical-semantic route — teal path. Looks the whole written word up in the orthographic lexicon, retrieves its meaning and stored pronunciation directly. Only available for words already in the mental lexicon.

Both routes accumulate activation toward a response threshold at once — a race/accumulator model of decision time:

dA/dt = k        (linear accumulation, LATER-style race)
Response fires when the first A(t) reaches θ = 1
k_nonlexical  ≈ constant  (GPC conversion rate)
k_lexical(f)  = 1 / (1.2 − 0.9·f)   f = frequency ∈ [0,1]
Naming latency = t at threshold crossing

The two routes only disagree for irregular words (e.g. "pint," "sieve"): the GPC route regularizes them ("pint" → rhymes with "mint"). Because k_lexical grows with word frequency, high-frequency irregular words are usually read correctly (lexical route wins the race), while low-frequency irregular words are read aloud more slowly and are more often regularized — the exact frequency × regularity interaction measured in naming-latency experiments and seen exaggerated in surface dyslexia, where damage to the lexical route forces reliance on GPC.

Non-lexical (GPC) route Lexical-semantic route

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