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Competition for attention between 2 written words was investigated by presenting the words briefly in a single stream of distractors (Experiment 1) or in different streams (Experiment 2-6), using rapid serial visual presentation at 53 ms/item. Stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was varied from 0 to 213 ms. At all SOAs there was strong competition, but which word was more likely to be reported shifted markedly with SOA. At SOAs in the range of 13-53 ms the second word was more likely to be reported, but at 213 ms, the advantage switched to the first word, as in the attentional blink. A 2-stage competition model of attention is proposed in which attention to a detected target is labile in Stage 1. Stage 1 ends when one target is identified, initiating a serial Stage 2 process of consolidation of that target.

A word's predictability in its context has a reliable influence on eye movements in reading. This article reviews the extensive literature that has investigated this influence, focusing on several specific empirical issues. These include assessment of cloze probability as the critical measure of predictability, the form of the relationship between predictability and reading time, the distributional effects of predictability, the interaction between predictability and word frequency, and the interaction between predictability and parafoveal preview. On the basis of this review, two theoretical conclusions are proposed. First, predictability effects in reading result from graded activation of potentially many words, as opposed to discrete prediction of a specific word. Second, this activation has the effect of facilitating either very early stages of lexical processing or pre‐lexical processing of visual features or letters.

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