Volume 13, Issue 3
  • ISSN 1871-1340
  • E-ISSN: 1871-1375
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An oft-cited shortcoming of Interactive Activation as a psychological model of word reading is that it lacks the ability to simultaneously represent words of different lengths.

We present an implementation of the Interactive Activation model, which we call Metameric, that can simulate words of different lengths, and show that there is nothing inherent to Interactive Activation which prevents it from simultaneously representing multiple word lengths. We provide an in-depth analysis of which specific factors need to be present, and show that the inclusion of three specific adjustments, all of which have been published in various models before, lead to an Interactive Activation model which is fully capable of representing words of different lengths. Finally, we show that our implementation is fully capable of representing all words between 2 and 11 letters in length from the English Lexicon Project (31, 416 words) in a single model. Our implementation is completely open source, heavily optimized, and includes both command line and graphical user interfaces, but is also agnostic to specific input data or problems. It can therefore be used to simulate a myriad of other models, e.g., models of spoken word recognition. The implementation can be accessed at www.github.com/clips/metameric.


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  • Article Type: Research Article
Keyword(s): computational modeling , interactive activation and lexical decision
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