On Knowing the Meaning of Words We are Unable to Report: The Effects of Visual Masking

Abstract

The errors generated by normal adults in attempting to read arrays of unrelated words, followed at brief delays by a graphemic pattern mask, are compared with the types of reading error produced, even with unlimited viewing time, by brain-damaged phonemic dyslexics. Among other findings, the discovery of semantically related reading errors (e.g., “blues” – “jazz”) under pattern masking leads to a reconsideration of the relation between processes involved in conscious perception or explicit report of a word’s identity and processes sufficient for a reader to be influenced by a word’s meaning. In one experiment subjects were touna able to report, selectively, words belonging to a prespecified semantic category, under conditions of masking such that only one word could be reported, on average, from each multiword array. In another experiment, the accuracy of report of a target word was facilitated by the presence of an associatively related word whose identity or even presence subjects were unable to report. Implications of these results are described in terms of an outline model for pattern masking and visual word recognition.

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