The Dual Route Cascaded Case Study

The Dual Route Cascaded (DRC) model of visual word recognition and reading aloud was proposed, in 2001, by Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, and Ziegler. This model is consisted of three routes, the lexical semantic route, the lexical non semantic route, and the grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) route, which are formed from a number of interacting layers. These layers contain sets of units representing the smallest parts of the model including word, letter or phoneme units. The units of different layers interact through inhibition and excitation, similar to the Interaction Activation model. Also, the units can interact on the same level through lateral inhibition. Adjacent layers can communicate in both excitatory and inhibitory, except
That is, “whether bilinguals have a single system of memory representation and processing devoted to all of the languages they use or separate systems, one for each language” (Kroll & Tokowicz 2005). Various models have been proposed to provide an answer to this question. Another important question that has been raised regarding these models is “how and to what extent the words from the bilingual’s two languages are interconnected at both the lexical and conceptual levels” (Sanchez-Casas & Garcia-Albea, 2005). It has been suggested that the nature and extent of the lexical and conceptual connections vary according to two variables: language user characteristics, such as level of proficiency, experience, and learning environment of the second language; and word characteristics including cognate status, concreteness, and word frequency (Sanchez-Casas & Garcia-Albea,
The two hypotheses were later termed “the single store hypothesis” and the “separate store hypothesis” respectively (Kolers, 1966, as cited in Kroll & Tokowicz 2005).
2.3.2. The Hierarchical model
Potter, So, Von Eckardt, & Feldman (1984) proposed two models of interlanguage connection: a) the word association model and b) the concept mediation model (Figure 2.4). The word association model assumes that L2 words (nondominant language) are linked to L1 words (dominant language) words, and L1 words are linked to the corresponding concept, but there is no direct link between the L2 word and its corresponding concept, that is, L2 words can only access the concepts through the L1 words.
The concept mediation model, in contrast, proposes that L1 and L2 words are both linked directly to the corresponding concept and indirectly to each other (Potter et al, 1984, as cited in Kroll & Stewart, 1994).
2.3.3. The Revised Hierarchical