A dual-task paradigm was used to assess attentional processing demands during visual word recognition. By manipulating the difficulty of each task, it is argued that the procedure estimates the attention demands of the memory-access component of word recognition. (Editor)

Meyer, Schvaneveldt, and Ruddy report that semantic context has a larger effect on visually degraded words than on undegraded words. Degrading stimuli takes place by superimposing a dot pattern over letters thereby slowing information processing. Four experiments explore alternative explanations of this research finding. (Editor/RK)