Modeling the Successes and Failures of Interventions for Disabled Readers

A connectionist model of reading development previously used to simulate detailed aspects of developmental dyslexia (Harm Seidenberg, 1999) was used to explore why certain classes of interventions designed to overcome reading impairments are more effective than others. Previous research has shown that interventions targeting the development of spelling–sound correspondences are more effective at promoting generalization skills than ones designed solely to increase phonological awareness. The simulations broadly replicate the patterns of success and failure found in the developmental literature and provide explicit computational insights into exactly why the interventions that include training on spelling–sound regularities are more effective than those targeting phonological development alone. The number of studies of interventions targeting developmental reading impairments is growing at a rapid rate (see Bus Ijzendoorn, 1999, for a recent review). Such studies typically involve testing one or more interventions with children; outcome measures indicate the relative strengths and weaknesses of the different interventions being considered. The benefits of such work are obvious: They give direct evidence for which of the tested interventions provide a more effective use of time and resources for the particular population of children studied. The difficulty is that