D. Dahan et al., Subcategorical mismatches and the time course of lexical access: Evidence for lexical competition, LANG COGN P, 16(5-6), 2001, pp. 507-534
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.