Lexical embeddings produce interference when they are morphologically unrelated to the words in which they are...

Many words in the English language contain semantically and morphologically unrelated smaller words (e.g., room in groom). Recent findings indicate that a high frequency embedded word produces interference during visual word identification (e.g., Bowers, Davis, & Hanley, 2005; Davis, Perea, & Acha, 2009; Davis & Taft, 2005). In an eye movement experiment we examined whether lexical embeddings produce interference even when explicit judgments about lexicality or category membership are not solicited. Participants silently read sentences that each contained a target word with a lexical embedding. Fixation times were longer on target words that contained a higher frequency embedding compared to those that contained a lower frequency embedding. This finding indicates that a high frequency embedding interferes with word identification during silent reading and adds to a growing body of evidence that a word's orthographic neighborhood includes embedded words.