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Appendice I 225INTRODUCTION"The world is worded before it is sentenced" (variation on a theme by Humboldt).READING, WORD RECOGNITION, AND THE LEXI-CAL DECISION TASK"The world of words is just as wondrous as the world of syntax, or even more so. For not only are peopleas infinitely creative with words as they are with phrases and sentences, but memorizing individualwords demands its own special virtuosity" (Pinker, 1994, p. 127).The general subject area of this paper is reading. As perhaps the finest achievement of human civilizationand one of the most complex activities of the human mind, explaining the whys and hows of reading skillrepresents an outstanding intellectual challenge for cognitive scientists. Since word recognition is the fundamentalprocess underlying reading skill, it provides the favorable focus for experimental reading research.At the level of word representations, all lower- and higher-level processes involved in reading seem to meet :Word representations are the central building blocks of language learning and processing (cf. Miller, 1993).It is here that sensory, orthographic, phonological, morphological, semantic, and syntactic operations convergeand diverge. The problem is to find out how these central representations are organized and how theyinteract with both lower- and higher-level processes that depend on task or language contexts. Solving thisproblem necessarily involves a multistep approach. Before tackling, for example, problems of word or sentenceproduction that reflect the "infinite creativity with words", we try to solve the problems concerning theperceptual and mnestic organization of lexical memory that are the basis of the "special virtuosity" mentionedin the above citation. Before tackling problems or morphosemantic and -syntactic processing ofwords, we try to answer simpler questions concerning orthographic and phonological processing 2 .Word recognition and reading are studied using a variety of experimental techniques, that still require afair amount of methodological and theoretical unification (Jacobs & Grainger, 1994 ; see also discussionsection). The most widely used modern experimental method for investigating visual and auditory word recognitionis the lexical decision task (LDT). Like any other experimental technique, it provides only indirectand incomplete information about the processes underlying word recognition, and therefore requires cognitivemodeling as a complement to experimental analyses. This paper focuses on such a model of word recognitionperformance as assessed by the LDT.ORTHOGRAPHIC AND PHONOLOGICAL PROCESSING : A MODEL-GUIDED,MULTILINGUISTIC, MULTITASK PERSPECTIVE BASED ON THREE SKEP-TICISMSFrom an evolutionary perspective, writing and reading evolved because humans needed a convenientmeans of coding and decoding oral language -which, as a means of externalization of thoughts, presumablyhad already stood its test on the scale of survival values- for purposes of storage, transmission, and tradition.In alphabetic writing systems, the individual elements of the alphabet correspond to the elementary soundsof the spoken language. The degree of this correspondence (its consistency) is variable and object of much(psycho)-linguistic research. In some places many-to-many mappings evolved (e.g., English and French),whether "naturally", following invasions, or via spelling reforms, whereas in others something closer toone-to-one mappings between script and sound evolved (e.g. Serbo-Croatian or Spanish). This considerablevariation across languages in the degree of correlation, or the consistency of the spelling-to-sound and thesound-to-spelling mappings ("deep" vs. "shallow" orthographies) provides a rich playground for crosslinguisticexperimental studies of reading skills (Carello, Turvey, & Lukatela, 1992 ; Frost, Katz, & Bentin,1987 ; Perfetti, Zhang, & Berent, 1992). Such studies have their costs, but for understanding the readingprocess they are more interesting than monolinguistic studies. Moreover, these considerable crosslinguisticvariations in consistency also provide a big challenge for researchers who aim at building computationalmultilingual, multitask models of reading (Carreiras, Perea, & Grainger, in press ; Dijkstra & Van Heuven,present volume ; Jacobs, 1995 ; Ziegler, 1996).Our research program, of which the present modeling efforts are an integral part, is multilinguistic, becausewe are skeptical about the view that the reading process can be understood by studying a single language.Instead, as many examples show, cross-linguistic research can avoid the dangers of premature or falseconclusions drawn from the results of monolinguistic work (Carello et al., 1992 ; Hagège, 1986 ;MacWhinney, Bates, & Kliegl, 1984 ; Lass, 1995 ; Marcus, Brinkmann, Clahsen, Wiese, & Pinker, 1995 ;Perfetti et al., 1992 ; Van Orden & Goldinger, 1994). Currently, our research program directly includes three2 Orthographic processing refers to the use of orthographic information, i.e. knowledge of the spellings ofwords. In alphabetic languages such as English, French, or German, we assume that such knowledge is letterbased.In particular, knowledge of how to spell a word is thought to be stored as a set of abstract representationsthat code both the identity and position of a word's component letters. Phonological processing refersto the use of phonological information (i.e., knowledge of the sounds of one's language) in processing writtenand oral language. The question which functional units code that knowledge is more complex than for orthographicprocessing, as discussed in the text.