The lexical access of multiple words during a single fixation: overlapping access processes?

ABSTRACT

Since it has become increasingly difficult to tease apart the predictions of serial and parallel models of eye movement control during reading, we return to the underlying theoretical question of whether parallel lexical processing of two words is, at the very least, psychologically plausible. Two horizontally aligned letter strings were presented simultaneously on a screen, the task being to decide whether they were physically identical or not. Even with presentation durations short enough to prohibit serial inspection of each word, the results show clear lexical effects: high frequency word pairs were responded to faster and with fewer errors than low frequency words. Effects of lexicality, orthography and scanning direction were also found. The results suggest that two words can be processed at a lexical level in an overlapping fashion.

KEYWORDS:

• Word recognition
• models of eye movement control
• same-different matching
• parallel lexical processing
• attention

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 An analysis by Murray et al. (2013) showed that the number of published papers referring to serial and parallel processing in the context of reading had risen steadily from just 8 per year in 1997 to over 100 per year in 2012.

2 Of course, such effects only provide explanatory value if they fall in the same direction as those that would otherwise have been produced in the targeted word.

3 Henderson (1974) also used horizontal alignment, but his items were restricted to orthographically illegal letter strings that were either meaningful or not meaningful (FBI vs IBF), for which he obtained a ‘word’ superiority effect for the former class of words.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) studentship awarded to the first author while at the University of Dundee, under grant ES/H018824/1.