An examination of orthographic and phonological processing using the task-choice procedure

Abstract

The task-choice procedure provides a way for assessing whether stimuli are processed immediately upon presentation and in parallel with other cognitive operations. In this procedure, the task changes on a trial-by-trial basis and the cue informing participants about the task appears either before or simultaneously with the target, which is either degraded or clear. Of interest is whether the effect of stimulus clarity will disappear when the cue is presented simultaneously with the target, suggesting capacity-free processing, or whether the effect of stimulus clarity will remain, suggesting target processing is delayed. Besner and Care developed this procedure using nonword targets and found that phonological information was not extracted in parallel with deciphering the task cue. The current experiment examined whether phonological and orthographic information could be extracted from word and nonword stimuli in a capacity-free manner. Results indicate that in both tasks some processing does occur in a capacity-free manner when words are used but not when nonwords are used. These data may be consistent with interactive activation models which posit top-down lexical connections that facilitate the extraction of sublexical codes.

Keywords:

• Word recognition
• Automaticity
• Orthography
• Phonology

Acknowledgements

This work was generously supported by a Charles F. and Evelyn M. Phillips Faculty Fellowship from Bates College awarded to the first author. We are grateful to Jim Enns for allowing us to collect data in his laboratory at the University of British Columbia.

Notes

¹We note that because automaticity is defined in many different ways, and because researchers may adopt different definitions, it is difficult to compare claims made about “automatic processing” when definitions are not always clearly stated. For example, it is certainly possible that phonological codes are extracted rapidly, without awareness, without intention, and that this processing cannot be interrupted by other cognitive operations once begun (and in this sense phonological codes are processed automatically), but this same type of processing might not be capacity free. The current experiments address the issue of whether orthographic and phonological codes are extracted in a capacity-free manner once a stimulus is presented.

²When the number of languages spoken (one vs. two) was added as a between-subjects factor in all of the analyses reported here, there were no main effects or interactions with this variable. All of the effects reported were identical for both groups of participants. This was somewhat surprising because Ruthruff, Allen, Lien, and Grabbe (2008) have found that word recognition processes occur in parallel for highly skilled readers but not for individuals with poor reading abilities. Perhaps group differences were not observed here because our bilinguals were all highly proficient in English and as such may not have differed from the monolinguals in terms of English reading proficiency.

³Each item was only responded to by three participants in each condition, and as a result several of the items in this experiment and in Experiment 2 had missing cells in some of the conditions of the item analysis once error trials were removed. We restricted the RT analysis to the items that had correct RT data in every condition.

⁴Since a pattern consistent with parallel processing may only be obtained when participants have a mental set in place for responding, and since Besner and Risko (2005) have argued that the mental set which is in place on one trial may carry over to the immediately following trial, we also conducted an analysis where we added task repetition as a variable (i.e., whether a phonological or orthographic task occurred twice in a row or whether there was a task switch). We did not do this for the item analysis because each item was only responded to by three participants in each condition (when task repetition was not added), and as such, if task repetition were added to the analysis most of the items would have missing cells once RTs on error trials were removed. Results from this analysis mirror those of Besner and Care (2003) as well as Paulitzki et al. (2009); the factor of task repetition did not moderate the stimulus clarityxcue-target SOA interaction reported (i.e., we did not find any three-way interaction with task repetition nor did we observe a four-way interaction). We did this same analysis in Experiment 2 and again found that task repetition did not moderate the stimulus clarity x cue-target SOAxtarget lexicality interaction.

⁵We note though that because target lexicality was manipulated in a between-subjects manner, we cannot rule out meta set factors which might somehow also be at play here. Despite this theoretical possibility, it is unclear to us how or why such factors would operate and what effect, if any, this would have on the data.

⁶Because task repetition was a selected variable, rather than a manipulated variable, target items were not counterbalanced across this; instead, target items randomly appeared as either repeat or switch for each participant independently. As such, target items in the repeat and switch conditions may vary in length, frequency, and orthographic neighbourhood density (Besner & Care, 2003 have also pointed out this limitation with task repetition analyses). Since each of these variables is known to influence target reaction times one should exercise caution when interpreting results of post-hoc analyses where task repetition is added as a factor.