Activation and competition in visual word identification

作为成年人，熟练的读者很少遇到识别单个单词的困难。但是单词识别的容易和速度是误导性的。单词识别是一系列复杂信息处理操作的顶点，对于语言研究者来说，这些过程一直是他们许多研究的焦点。作为这些调查的结果，人们如何识别单词的理论和模型已经开发出来，每一个都体现了对快速识别单词的处理性质的某些假设。在所有的模型中，一个词被识别的速度受到读者对其他在拼写上相似的词（该词的“邻居”）的知识的影响。根据这些模型，当一个词被呈现时，这个词的心理表征和这个词的邻居的心理表征被激活。一些模型的进一步假设是，这些表征之间存在竞争，这种竞争在单词识别过程中起着核心作用。我的研究将通过考察一个词的识别如何受到其邻居的影响来测试这些假设：如果一个词和它的邻居在阅读这个词时存在竞争，那么这将影响识别这个词所需的时间。我的研究将使用其他研究者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阅读句子时的眼睛。这项研究很重要，因为单词的识别是熟练阅读的基础，在理解我们如何阅读之前，必须首先理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.