Activation and competition in visual word identification

作为成年人，熟练的读者很少会遇到识别单个单词的困难。但识别单词的便捷性和速度却具有误导性。单词识别是一系列复杂信息处理操作的顶峰，对于语言研究人员来说，这些过程一直是他们许多研究的焦点。这些研究的结果是，人们开发了许多关于人们如何识别单词的理论和模型，每个理论和模型都体现了关于快速识别单词的处理本质的某些假设。在所有模型中，识别单词的速度受到读者对其他拼写相似的单词（该单词的“邻居”）的了解的影响。根据模型，当出现一个单词时，该单词的心理表征以及该单词的邻居的心理表征都会被激活。一些模型的进一步假设是这些表示之间存在竞争，并且这种竞争在单词识别过程中起着核心作用。我的研究将通过检查一个单词的识别如何受到其邻居的影响来测试这些假设：如果在阅读该单词时一个单词与其邻居之间存在竞争，那么这将影响识别该单词所需的时间。我的研究将使用其他研究人员很少使用的实验技术来测试这些假设，包括使用眼动监测设备来跟踪读者在阅读句子时的眼睛。这项研究很重要，因为单词识别是熟练阅读的基础，在了解我们如何阅读之前，必须首先了解负责快速识别单个单词的过程。

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.