Abstract
The extent to which readers can exert strategic control over oral reading processes is a matter of debate. According to the pathway control hypothesis, the relative contributions of the lexical and nonlexical pathways can be modulated by the characteristics of the context stimuli being read, but an alternative time criterion model is also a viable explanation of past results. In Experiment 1, subjects named high- and low-frequency regular words in the context of either low-frequency exception words (e.g., pint) or nonwords (e.g., flirp). Frequency effects (faster pronunciation latencies for high-frequency words) were attenuated in the nonword context, consistent with the notion that nonwords emphasize the characteristics of the frequency-insensitive nonlexical pathway. Importantly, we also assessed memory for targets, and a similar attenuation of the frequency effect in recognition memory was observed in the nonword condition. Converging evidence was obtained in a second experiment in which a variable that was more sensitive to the nonlexical pathway (orthographic neighborhood size) was manipulated. The results indicated that both speeded pronunciation performance and memory performance were relatively attenuated in the low-frequency exception word context in comparision with the nonword context. The opposing influences of list context type for word frequency and orthographic neighborhood size effects in speeded pronunciation and memory performance provide strong support for the pathway control model, as opposed to the time criterion model.
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This research was supported by NSF Grant BCS 0001801 and NIH Grant PO1 AGO3991. S.H.K.K. is now at the Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego. This research was presented in a poster at the 49th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Chicago, in November 2008.
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Kang, S.H.K., Balota, D.A. & Yap, M.J. Pathway control in visual word processing: Converging evidence from recognition memory. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 16, 692–698 (2009). https://doi.org/10.3758/PBR.16.4.692
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/PBR.16.4.692