A counterintuitive and theoretically important pattern of results in the visual word recognition literature is that both word frequency and stimulus quality produce large but additive effects in lexical decision performance. The additive nature of these effects has recently been called into question by Masson and Kliegl (in press), who used linear…

R. Ratcliff, P. Gomez, and G. McKoon (2004) suggested much of what goes on in lexical decision is attributable to decision processes and may not be particularly informative about word recognition. They proposed that lexical decision should be characterized by a decision process, taking the form of a drift-diffusion model (R. Ratcliff, 1978), that…