Lexical recognition of embedded unattended words: Some implications for reading processes☆

Abstract Two questions were addressed by these experiments. Firstly, do unattended words influence attended words only when they appear in isolation and thereby may attract attention, or are they influential even when embedded amongst ineffective material? Secondly, can the influence of an unattended display be increased by increasing the number of potentially effective words. By having observers give category names to attended words at the same time as masked unattended words appeared in a column to the right of fixation, experiment 1 found that a single word was effective even when embedded, and that an increasing effect was not observed with a display with a 50 msec duration. There was some evidence of a linear increase in the size of the effect with a 200 msec display, but evidence from experiment 2 suggests that subjects may have been aware of the unattended words when they were exposed for this duration. The results were discussed in relation to a model of eye-fixation control during reading which postulates that unattended words gain lexical recognition when they are semantically related to the attended activity. This lexical recognition may then serve to mark interesting locations in the text and attract future eye-fixations.

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