Reading meaning rides on two cooperating word-recognition routes

Correct: B — Two cooperating pathways — direct orthography-to-semantics and indirect orthography-to-phonology-to-semantics — whose relative weight depends on word and reader characteristics

Harm & Seidenberg (2004) implemented a large-scale connectionist model in which orthographic input feeds two pathways: a direct route to semantic representations and an indirect route through phonology. Both contribute to reading comprehension, with relative reliance shifting by word familiarity, regularity, depth of orthography, and reader expertise. The model accounts for findings that experienced readers can access meaning rapidly without overt phonological recoding while still showing phonological influence on lexical decisions. The framework bridges classical 'dual-route' reading theories with distributed connectionist mechanisms and remains a benchmark for computational models of word recognition.