Using the oral and manual Stroop tasks we tested the claim that retrieval of meaning from a written word is automatic, in the sense that it cannot be controlled. The semantic interference effect (greater interference caused by color-related words than color-neutral words) was used as the index of semantic activation. To manipulate the level of…

It is well known that information from spoken language is integrated into reading processes, but the nature of these links and how they are acquired is less well understood. Recent evidence has suggested that predictions about the written form of newly learned spoken words are already generated prior to print exposure. We extend this work to…

The boundary paradigm was used to investigate individual differences in the extraction of lexical information from the parafovea in sentence reading. The preview of a target word was manipulated so that it was identical (e.g., "sped"), a higher frequency orthographic neighbor ("seed"), a nonword neighbor ("sted"), or…