MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE - CONTEXT EFFECTS IN WORD IDENTIFICATION

The influence of semantic context on word identification was examined using masked target displays. Related prime words enhanced a signal de tection measure of sensitivity in making lexical decisions and in dete rmining whether a probe word matched the target word. When line drawin gs were used as primes, a similar benefit was obtained with the probe task. Although these results suggest that contextual information affec ts perceptual encoding, this conclusion is questioned on the grounds t hat sensitivity in these tasks may be determined by independent contri butions of perceptual and contextual information. The plausibility of this view is supported by a simulation of the experiments using a conn ectionist model in which perceptual and semantic information make inde pendent contributions to word identification. The model also predicts results with two other analytic methods that have been used to argue f or priming effects on perceptual encoding.