Reading acquisition primarily relies on orthographic learning.
Behavioral studies show that familiarity with a novel word’s
pronunciation facilitates learning, particularly in semantically
meaningful contexts. Two main components of orthographic
learning are commonly described: perceptual processing of
the visual stimulus, to infer corresponding phonological rep-
resentations, and “pronunciation correction”, to correct errors
from perceptual processing. Currently, pronunciation correc-
tion has not been featured in reading acquisition computa-
tional models. This study uses BRAID-Acq, a reading ac-
quisition model, to implement and compare two pronunciation
correction mechanisms (an “online” and a “post-processing”
variant). We simulated learning of words with and without
prior phonological knowledge and explored the impact of con-
text strength and size on learning. Results indicate that both
mechanisms improve decoding. However, the post-processing
mechanism induced implausible lexicalization for words with-
out prior phonological knowledge, while the online mecha-
nism did not. Overall, our simulation results suggest that pro-
nunciation correction could be construed as an online process