Phonotactic Constraints: Implications for Models of Oral Reading in Russian Anastasia Ulicheva University of Hong Kong and Macquarie University Max Coltheart and Steven Saunders Macquarie University Conrad Perry Swinburne University of Technology The present article investigates how phonotactic rules constrain oral reading in the Russian language. The pronunciation of letters in Russian is regular and consistent, but it is subject to substantial phonotactic influence: the position of a phoneme and its phonological context within a word can alter its pronunci- ation. In Part 1 of the article, we analyze the orthography-to-phonology and phonology-to-phonology (i.e., phonotactic) relationships in Russian monosyllabic words. In Part 2 of the article, we report empirical data from an oral word reading task that show an effect of phonotactic dependencies on skilled reading in Russian: humans are slower when reading words where letter-phoneme correspondences are highly constrained by phonotactic rules compared with those where there are few or no such constraints present. A further question of interest in this article is how computational models of oral reading deal with the phonotactics of the Russian language. To answer this question, in Part 3, we report simulations from the Russian dual-route cascaded model (DRC) and the Russian connectionist dual-process model (CDP++) and assess the performance of the 2 models by testing them against human data. Keywords: Russian, phonotactic rules, oral reading, computational modeling The world’s writing systems link spoken words to more or less arbitrary written symbols. Over time, spoken languages evolve, often at a faster pace than their written analogues integrate these changes. We often think of reading as a process that maps ortho- graphic units onto phonology. One has to bear in mind though that the interplay between orthography and phonology is complex, and the translation from orthography to phonology may be obscured by different factors. In English, one such factor is morphology. For example, with the English words “heal” and “health,” the mor- phology is preserved in the spelling, which leads to the inconsis- tency of orthography-to-phonology mapping, that is, the same set of letters mapping to a different vowel phoneme. In Russian, such inconsistency is because of phonotactic constraints that, likewise, break the symmetry between orthography and phonology. For example, in  /kot/ “code” and  /dok/ “dock” one letter, , receives different pronunciations, because of phonotactic con- straints that apply. Phonotactics is a branch of phonology that describes the restric- tions on the contextual and positional distribution of phonemes. Such restrictions control the ordering of phonemes in syllables, consonant clusters, and vowel sequences. For instance, acousti- cally more sonorous sounds tend to follow less sonorous sounds (Selkirk, 1984). To illustrate, the onset /pla-/ occurs in English but the onset /lpa-/ does not, with one possible reason for this being the violation of the sonority hierarchy (i.e., where /l/ is less sonorous than /p/). Similar principles control syllabic structures in many languages, including Russian (Chaburgaev, 1974). Phonotactic constraints can also be language-specific: for instance, the devoic- ing of word-final consonant phonemes occurs in Russian ( /kot/), but not in English (cold /kəυld/). Do phonotactic constraints influence how humans read writ- ten language? This is the question raised in the present article using the Russian language as an example. It was investigated in two ways: (a) By an experiment on speeded reading aloud using words varying in important psycholinguistic characteristics (that in- cluded a variable that determined the extent to which the pronunciation of a word was subject to a phonotactic con- straint, Part 2), and (b) By developing Russian versions of the DRC (Coltheart et al., 2001) and the CDP++ (Perry, Ziegler, & Zorzi, 2010, This article was published Online First December 7, 2015. Anastasia Ulicheva, Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Univer- sity of Hong Kong and ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CCD), Macquarie University; Max Coltheart and Steven Saun- ders, ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CCD), and Department of Cognitive Science, Macquarie University; Conrad Perry, Faculty of Life and Social Sciences, Swinburne University of Technology. This research was funded by Hong Kong Ph.D. Fellowship awarded to A.U., M.C., and S.S. are supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (project number CE110001021). We would like to thank Johannes Ziegler for facilitating the development of the Russian version of CDP++. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to An- astasia Ulicheva, Division of Speech and Hearing Sciences, University of Hong Kong, 1 Pokfulam, Hong Kong SAR China. E-mail: ulicheva@ connect.hku.hk This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers. This article is intended solely for the personal use of the individual user and is not to be disseminated broadly. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition © 2015 American Psychological Association 2016, Vol. 42, No. 4, 636 – 656 0278-7393/16/$12.00 http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xlm0000203 636