Subcategorical mismatches and the time course of lexical access: Evidence for lexical competition

Participants' eye movements were monitored as they followed spoken instruct ions to click on a pictured object with a computer mouse (e.g., "click on t he net"). Participants were slower to fixate the target picture when the on set of the target word came from a competitor word (e.g., ne(ck)t) than fro m a nonword (e.g., ne(p)t), as predicted by models of spoken-word recogniti on that incorporate lexical competition. This was found whether the picture of the competitor word (e.g., the picture of a neck) was present on the di splay or not. Simulations with the TRACE model captured the major trends of fixations to the target and its competitor over time. We argue that eye mo vements provide a fine-grained measure of lexical activation over time, and thus reveal effects of lexical competition that are masked by response mea sures such as lexical decisions.