Activation and competition in visual word identification

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As adults, skilled readers seldom experience difficulty identifying individual words. But the ease and speed with which words are identified is misleading. Word identification is the culmination of a sequence of sophisticated information processing operations, and for language researchers these processes have been the focus of many of their investigations. As a result of these investigations, a number of theories and models of how people identify words have been developed, each embodying certain assumptions about the nature of the processing underlying the rapid identification of words. In all of the models, the speed with which a word is identified is influenced by the reader's knowledge of other, orthographically similar words (the word's "neighbors"). According to the models, when a word is presented, the mental representation of the word and the mental representations of the word's neighbors are activated. A further assumption of some models is that there is competition among these representations and this competition plays a central role in the word identification process. My research will test these assumptions by examining how the identification of a word is affected by its neighbours: if there is competition between a word and its neighbours when the word is read then this will affect the time required to identify the word. My research will use experimental techniques that have seldom been used by other investigators to test these assumptions, including the use of eye movement monitoring equipment to track readers' eyes while they read sentences. This research is important because the identification of words is the foundation of skilled reading, and before there can be any understanding of how we read there must first be an understanding of the processes responsible for the rapid identification of individual words.