Basic processes in reading aloud and colour naming: Towards a better understanding of the role of spatial attention

Abstract

Whether or not lexical access from print requires spatial attention has been debated intensively for the last 30 years. Studies involving colour naming generally find evidence that “unattended” words are processed. In contrast, reading-based experiments do not find evidence of distractor processing. One theory ascribes the discrepancy to weaker attentional demands for colour identification. If colour naming does not capture all of a subject's attention, the remaining attentional resources can be deployed to process the distractor word. The present study combined exogenous spatial cueing with colour naming and reading aloud separately and found that colour naming is less sensitive to the validity of a spatial cue than is reading words aloud. Based on these results, we argue that colour naming studies do not effectively control attention so that no conclusions about unattended distractor processing can be drawn from them. Thus we reiterate the consistent conclusion drawn from reading aloud and lexical decision studies: There is no word identification without (spatial) attention.

Keywords:

• Reading
• Spatial attention
• Visual word recognition.

Supported by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders [grant number CE110001021] (http://www.ccd.edu.au), a doctoral fellowship from the Natural Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) to S.R., and from NSERC to D.B. [grant number AO998].

Notes

1 Colour naming is typically slower than word reading. However, when the task involves button presses or moving a mouse to a coloured patch, colour identification is faster than word identification (Durgin, 2000). Thus it is likely that the relative slowness of colour naming is related to the process of converting the colour into a phonological code and not the process of identifying the colour itself.

2 Though response times are faster when reading aloud than when colour naming in this experiment, there is no reason to be concerned about scaling effects. The faster condition (reading words) is producing the larger cueing effects. Scaling the reaction times would only amplify this already significant interaction.

3 This analysis was repeated with the removed subject included to ensure that one subject does not unduly influence the results. Though the t values shifted, there were no changes to the pattern of significant results. However in the vincentile analysis, inclusion of this subject's slowest trials made the slowest bin uninterpretable (invalidly cued trials for colour naming were much faster than validly cued trials—a reverse cueing effect). For that reason, we only report analyses with the subject excluded.