Abstract
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.
