Reading aloud: evidence for contextual control over lexical activation.

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Psychology
• Neuroscience of Reading
• Human Information Processing

Background:

• The ability of readers to exert unconscious control over cognitive processes in the reading system remains an area of investigation.
• Understanding how factors like context and stimulus quality influence word recognition is crucial for models of reading.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether readers can exert unconscious control over activation in the reading system.
• To examine the interplay between prime-target relation, context, stimulus quality, and relatedness proportion on word reading aloud.

Main Methods:

• Four experiments were conducted where participants read target words aloud.
• Manipulated variables included prime-target relation (semantic, repetition), context (related, unrelated), stimulus quality (bright, dim), and relatedness proportion (RP).

Main Results:

• In high relatedness proportion (RP = .5) conditions, an interaction between semantic context and stimulus quality was observed, replicating prior findings.
• Low RP conditions (RP = .25) showed additive effects of semantic context and stimulus quality.
• When low RP was combined with repetition priming, context and stimulus quality interacted again.

Conclusions:

• The results support a framework of reading with the added assumption of controllable feedback between different processing levels.
• This suggests a degree of unconscious reader control over the reading system's activation patterns.