When too much visual stimuli is present, the phenomenon of clutter is known to degrade an individual's perception across a variety of domains, ranging from completing search tasks incorrectly, to decreasing reading speed when letters are too close together. However, research is lacking as to whether the negative effects of clutter impact learning…

In this article we present two lexical decision experiments that examine the role of base frequency and of derivative suffix productivity in visual recognition of Spanish words. In the first experiment we find that complex words with productive derivative suffixes result in lower response times than those with unproductive derivative suffixes.…

The goal of the current study is to assess the temporal dynamics of vision and action to evaluate the underlying word representations that guide infants' responses. Sixteen-month-old infants participated in a two-alternative forced-choice word-picture matching task. We conducted a moment-by-moment analysis of looking and reaching behaviors as they…

We report 3 experiments that examined whether presentation of a spoken word creates an attentional bottleneck associated with lexical processing in the absence of a response to that word. A spoken word and a visual stimulus were presented in quick succession, but only the visual stimulus demanded a response. Response times to the visual stimulus…

Reaction times in lexical decision are more sensitive to a words' length and orthographic-neighborhood density when the stimulus is presented to the left visual field (LVF) than to the right visual field (RVF). We claim that the length effect is equivalent to the neighborhood effect, and propose a novel explanation of why the LVF, but not the RVF,…

Research on bilingual word recognition suggests that lexical access is nonselective with respect to language, i.e., that word representations of both languages become active during recognition. One piece of evidence supporting nonselective access is that bilinguals recognize cognates (words that are identical or similar in form and meaning in two…

Stroop dilution is the reduction of the Stroop effect in the presence of a neutral word. It has been attributed to competition for attention between the color word and neutral word, to competition between all stimuli in the visual field, and to perceptual interference. Five experiments tested these accounts. The critical manipulation was whether…

Repeated observations of a colored form results in slower reaction-time responses to the familiarized stimulus than to a comparable novel stimulus due to alertness decrement and encoding facilitation. This two-factor theory of repetition was found to hold for words as well as for colors. (Author/BW)

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)

Reaction time and accuracy do not always reflect the same perceptual processes; therefore, the convergence of reaction time with accuracy within the context of a specific information processing model should be demonstrated empirically rather than assumed a priori. (Author/PN)

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)

Reports on a series of four experiments designed to determine more precisely the characteristics of the stage of visual feature analysis of word identification and to examine response competition factors in this interference task. (SB)

Tachistoscopic tests to identify three-letter words and simple geometric shapes were administered to 64 Italian children, ages 7-8. Results showed no significant differences in visual perceptual threshold between the two hemifields for either test, which was interpreted as confirming a lesser and not definitely determined lateralization in…

A discrete color naming paradigm was used in two experiments examining activation along orthographic and phonological dimensions in visual and auditory word recognition. Subjects were 80 college students who were presented with a prime word, either auditorally or visually, followed 200 milliseconds later by a target word printed in a color. The…

This study investigated the effects of left and right intracranial tumors on picture and word recognition memory. We hypothesized that left hemispheric (LH) patients would exhibit greater word recognition memory impairment than right hemispheric (RH) patients, with no significant hemispheric group picture recognition memory differences. The LH…