The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to determine the degree to which people can process words while devoting central attention to another task. Experiments 1-4 measured the N400 effect, which is sensitive to the degree of mismatch between a word and the current semantic context. Experiment 5 measured the P3 difference between…

What form is the lexical phonology that gives rise to phonological effects in visual lexical decision? The authors explored the hypothesis that beyond phonological contrasts the physical phonetic details of words are included. Three experiments using lexical decision and 1 using naming compared processing times for printed words (e.g., plead and…

Sensory or input factors can influence the strength of interference in the classic Stroop color-word task. Specifically, in a single-trial computerized version of the Stroop task, when color-word pairs were incongruent, opponent color pairs (e.g., the word BLUE in yellow) showed reduced Stroop interference compared with nonopponent color pairs…

Subjects instructed to circle misspellings while reading prose were less likely to detect misspellings in function than in content words. Misspellings that changed the shape of a word were more likely to be detected. It is not clear whether differences between function and content words are due to familiarity or redundancy. (Author/RD)

Earlier research with the lexical decision task led to the hypothesis that semantic context facilitates the encoding of words related to the context. Six experiments which employed different tasks (e.g., making a lexical decision) and different experimental paradigms (e.g., tachistoscopic exposures with masking stimuli) further investigated this…

Orthographic context and visual letter information were independently varied in a letter recognition task. The results contradicted the qualitative predictions of nonindependence theories of reading and are accurately described by a quantification of independence theory. (Author/CP)