The study examined whether words are misperceived during natural fluent reading and the extent to which contextual and lexical properties bias perception. Target words were pairs of orthographic neighbors that differed in frequency. Pretarget context was neutral (Experiment 1) or biased toward the higher frequency member of the pair (Experiments 2 and 3), and posttarget context was neutral, congruent, or incongruent. Critically, incongruent context was constructed so that it was congruent with the target's neighbor. First-pass viewing showed only effects of target frequency. During silent reading (Experiments 1 and 2), rereading measures showed that the target frequency effect was smaller in the incongruent posttarget context condition than in the neutral and congruent conditions, and this occurred irrespective of prior context. Presumably, lower frequency words were less impeded by incongruent context because they were often misperceived as a congruent higher frequency neighbor. An oral reading task (Experiment 3) showed that the lower frequency target was more often misread than the higher frequency neighbor, and this proneness to error was influenced by posttarget context. Although target frequency influenced proneness to error, biased prior sentence context appeared to influence the construal of sentence meaning to accommodate incongruent targets and posttarget context. (PsycINFO Database Record

Spoken word recognition models incorporate the temporal unfolding of word information by assuming that positional match constrains lexical activation. Recent findings challenge the linearity constraint. In the visual world paradigm, Toscano, Anderson, and McMurray observed that listeners preferentially viewed a picture of a target word’s anadrome competitor (e.g., competitor bus for target sub) compared with phonologically unrelated distractors (e.g., well) or competitors sharing an overlapping vowel (e.g., sun). Toscano et al. concluded that spoken word recognition relies on coarse grain spectral similarity for mapping spoken input to a lexical representation. Our experiments aimed to replicate the anadrome effect and to test the coarse grain similarity account using competitors without vowel position overlap (e.g., competitor leaf for target flea). The results confirmed the original effect: anadrome competitor fixation curves diverged from unrelated distractors approximately 275 ms after the onset of the target word. In contrast, the no vowel position overlap competitor did not show an increase in fixations compared with the unrelated distractors. The contrasting results for the anadrome and no vowel position overlap items are discussed in terms of theoretical implications of sequential match versus coarse grain similarity accounts of spoken word recognition. We also discuss design issues (repetition of stimulus materials and display parameters) concerning the use of the visual world paradigm in making inferences about online spoken word recognition.

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