Visual word recognition: Evidence for a serial bottleneck in lexical access.

ABSTRACT: Reading is a demanding task, constrained by inherent processing capacity limits. Do those capacity limits allow for multiple words to be recognized in parallel? In a recent study, we measured semantic categorization accuracy for nouns presented in pairs. The words were replaced by post-masks after an interval that was set to each subject's threshold, such that with focused attention they could categorize one word with ~80% accuracy. When subjects tried to divide attention between both words, their accuracy was so impaired that it supported a serial processing model: on each trial, subjects could categorize one word but had to guess about the other. In the experiments reported here, we investigated how our previous result generalizes across two tasks that require lexical access but vary in

SUBMITTER: White AL 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7297702 | biostudies-literature | 2020 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature