The attentional control of lexical processing pathways: Reversing the wordfrequency effect

In two experiments, we investigated the influence of word frequency in spee ded word naming and in a relatively novel regularization task in which part icipants were required to pronounce words on the basis of spelling-to-sound correspondences instead of giving their normal pronunciations (e.g., prono unce pint so that it rhymes with hint). Participants were presented high- a nd low-frequency regular words and exception words, along with a set of non words. The results indicated that there was a normal word frequency effect (i.e., high-frequency words faster than low-frequency words) in the standar d speeded naming task, whereas, for the regularization task, the word frequ ency effect was reversed for regular words, even though the regular words w ere pronounced in an identical fashion in both the normal naming and the re gularization tasks. This reversal of the word frequency effect was not obta ined for the exception words. The discussion focuses on the implication of these results for attentional control models of lexical processing.