Word misperception, the neighbor frequency effect, and the role of sentence context: evidence from eye movements.
An eye movement experiment was conducted to investigate whether the processing of a word can be affected by its higher frequency neighbor (HFN). Target words with an HFN (birch) or without one (spruce) were embedded into 2 types of sentence frames: 1 in which the HFN (birth) could fit given the prior sentence context, and 1 in which it could not. The results suggest that words can be misperceived as their HFN, and that top-down information from sentence context strongly modulates this effect. Implications for models of word recognition and eye movements during reading are discussed.
Slattery
Timothy J
TJ
Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, USA. tslattery@ucsd.edu
D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology*; D005403:Fixation, Ocular / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D009903:Optical Illusions / Q000502:physiology; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics