Treffer: Visual attention and cross-linguistic effects in reading: Simulations with BRAID-Acq, a probabilistic model of reading

International audience ; Theories of reading are mostly based on English, that is rather atypical among alphabetic orthographies due to its inconsistent orthography-phonology mappings. Differences in length effects have been observed between languages. Psycholinguistic characteristics of the orthography, such as orthographic depth, seem to have an impact on reading strategies and could be correlated with different visual-attentional profiles. However, no computational model has yet demonstrated the impact of language-dependent visual-attentional mechanisms on reading. This study explores these effects using BRAID-Acq, a probabilistic reading model with a visual-attentional module. We simulated word and pseudoword reading in English, German, and French to examine how orthographic depth and visual attention shape processing. Our simulation results suggest an effect of the orthography on processing time. In particular, English requires a larger attentional quantity for efficient processing of words and pseudowords, offering a novel interpretation of difficulties in reading acquisition in English.