Interference from Adjacent Words in Visual Word Recognition

Recent findings show that lexical activation is slower when words are surrounded by other words, as they always are in natural reading. Here we focus on the proposal that this is due to direct interference from adjacent words that are processed in parallel. In three experiments using a flanked masked visual word adaptation of the visual world paradigm with adult skilled readers, we probed the spatial conditions for interference. Target words were flashed at fixation for 75 ms flanked by other words before being masked; we studied gaze shifts to the image (out of four displayed) corresponding to the target. We found that interference increases with proximity and is asymmetric (stronger from the right side). In the third experiment we included an image for one of the flanker words and we obtained direct evidence for lexical activation of the right-side flanker, consistent with parallel models of word recognition. Intriguingly, the strong asymmetry of lexical activation stands in contrast to a much weaker asymmetry in overall interference, indicating that different levels of representation are differentially involved in the online interactions among adjacent words. In all, our findings constitute strong evidence for distributed attention around fixation differentially affecting diverse word processing stages, and call for a reconsideration of word recognition models that posit independent processing of individual words. They also confirm that the masked flanked visual word visual world paradigm is appropriate for studying attentional allocation during reading.