Mlinarič Maša, Los Sander A, Snell Joshua
Department of Experimental and Applied Psychology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Van der Boechorststraat 7, 1081 HV, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Atten Percept Psychophys. 2025 Jul;87(5):1704-1716. doi: 10.3758/s13414-025-03101-x. Epub 2025 Jun 5.
Various models of reading assume that information from up to five words is processed in parallel. Although there is evidence that foveal words can be processed simultaneously with directly adjacent words, it remains to be seen whether three words is the limit. To empirically test this, we designed a lexical decision flanker task with three flankers on each side of the target. In two experiments (offline (N = 49) and online (N = 98)), target words were either orthographically unrelated to all flankers or repeated in one out of six flanker positions. Stimuli were briefly presented, allowing us to assume that flanker effects, if any, would stem from simultaneous rather than sequential processing of the target and flankers. We observed flanker effects for flankers immediately adjacent to the target word. However, the relatedness of flankers in more remote positions did not impact recognition of the target. Our results suggest that word processing occurs for approximately three words in parallel, which is more than what some theories (e.g., E-Z Reader, Chinese Reading Model) suggest, but less than what some other theories (e.g., Glenmore, OB1-reader) suggest.
各种阅读模型都假定，来自多达五个单词的信息是并行处理的。尽管有证据表明，中央凹处的单词可以与直接相邻的单词同时进行处理，但三个单词是否为极限仍有待观察。为了对此进行实证检验，我们设计了一项词汇判断侧翼干扰任务，在目标词的每一侧各有三个侧翼干扰词。在两项实验中（离线实验，N = 49；在线实验，N = 98），目标词要么在拼写上与所有侧翼干扰词无关，要么在六个侧翼干扰词位置中的一个位置重复出现。刺激呈现时间较短，这使我们可以假定，如果存在侧翼干扰效应，那将源于目标词和侧翼干扰词的同时处理而非顺序处理。我们观察到，与目标词紧邻的侧翼干扰词会产生侧翼干扰效应。然而，位置更远的侧翼干扰词之间的相关性并不会影响目标词的识别。我们的结果表明，单词处理大约是并行处理三个单词，这比一些理论（例如，E-Z Reader、中文阅读模型）所认为的要多，但比其他一些理论（例如，Glenmore、OB1-reader）所认为的要少。
