The Utility of Item-Level Analyses in Model Evaluation: A Reply to Seidenberg and Plaut

Seidenberg and Plaut (this issue) argue that the implications of our analyses (Spieler & Balota, 1997) for the two extant connectionist models of word naming are limited by two factors. First, variables outside the scope of these models influence naming performance, so it is not surprising that the models do not account for much of the variance at the item level. Second, there is error variance associated with large item-level data sets that obviously should not be captured by these models. We point out that there are a number of variables that have been incorporated within the targeted connectionist models that should provide these models an advantage over the simple predictor variables that we selected as a baseline to evaluate the efficacy of the models (e.g., log frequency, length in letters, and number of orthographic neighbors). We also point out that there is considerable consistency across four large-scale studies of item means. Finally, we provide evidence that even under conditions of a standard word-naming study (with a small set of items), simple word frequency, orthographic neighborhoods, and length accounted for more variance than the extant connectionist models. We conclude that item-level analyses provide an important source of evidence in the evaluation of current models and the development of future models of visual word recognition.