It describes the most comprehensive theory currently in existence about the set of mental processes people use for reading—both for recognizing printed words and for reading aloud. The paper also offers explanations of a variety of different patterns of reading impairment that can be seen after brain damage, as well as having something to say about children's reading problems.

It describes a methodology known as "nested modeling". The idea here is that when you develop a new theory which can explain certain previously puzzling findings in some field that other theories cannot explain, this is pointless unless you also show that the new theory can also explain the phenomena that those previous theories can also explain. Otherwise you are not making any progress. Sounds obvious: but it is rarely done in cognitive psychology.

Continuous research funding for this particular research from the Australian Research Council over a 10-year period. This was indeed a big project!

When you learn to read, what you learn is a complicated set of skills, each skill to do with one specific part of the reading process (e.g. how to recognize letters, how to recognize whole words, how to use letter-sound rules, etc). To understand how people read, we need to know what exactly are these different skills, and how they interact with each other. The DRC model of reading proposes an answer to this question. What's more, it is a computational model—that is, "t" is an actual computer program that recognizes words and reads aloud, and the program does this while using exactly the same set of skills that we think human readers use. Skilled human readers show various different patterns of impaired reading after brain damage and these same patterns of errors can also be seen in the reading of the DRC model when different parts of the program are disabled.

Professor Max Coltheart DSc FASSA FAA FBA
ARC Federation Fellow and Scientific Director, Macquarie Centre for
Cognitive Science,
Building C5A Room 570
Macquarie University, Sydney NSW 2109 Australia