An examination of orthographic and phonological processing using the task-choice procedure

Abstract

The task-choice procedure provides a way for assessing whether stimuli are processed immediately upon presentation and in parallel with other cognitive operations. In this procedure, the task changes on a trial-by-trial basis and the cue informing participants about the task appears either before or simultaneously with the target, which is either degraded or clear. Of interest is whether the effect of stimulus clarity will disappear when the cue is presented simultaneously with the target, suggesting capacity-free processing, or whether the effect of stimulus clarity will remain, suggesting target processing is delayed. Besner and Care developed this procedure using nonword targets and found that phonological information was not extracted in parallel with deciphering the task cue. The current experiment examined whether phonological and orthographic information could be extracted from word and nonword stimuli in a capacity-free manner. Results indicate that in both tasks some processing does occur in a capacity-free manner when words are used but not when nonwords are used. These data may be consistent with interactive activation models which posit top-down lexical connections that facilitate the extraction of sublexical codes.

Visual word recognition: Attention, intention, context, and processing dynamics.

“…Besner and Care thus concluded that cue identification and the instantiation of a task set (an intention) preceded any processing of the target indexed by the stimulus quality effect. The same pattern was reported in the followup work by Kahan et al (2011) in a similar experiment; there is thus some generality to the observation that stimulus quality and SOA produce additive effects in this version of the task set procedure (relatedly, see Oriet & Jolcoeur, 2003 for their task set experiment).…”

“…An important qualification is that the nature of the stimuli influences the relation between stimulus quality and SOA. In contrast to what both Besner and Care (2003) and Kahan et al (2011) reported when they used nonwords; Paulitzki et al (2009) reported that, when only words appeared in their experiment, stimulus quality and SOA produced an under-additive interaction in which the effect of stimulus quality was smaller at the zero SOA than the long SOA for both tasks (again, reading aloud and case decision; see Table 2). Kahan et al (2011) also reported this same pattern of under additivity in an experiment in which only words appeared.…”

“…That prediction was not borne out by the data. Whereas there were strong effects of both SOA and stimulus quality, there was no interaction of those factors, in contrast to what was observed by Paulitzki et al (2009) and Kahan et al (2011). The left-hand side of Figure 8 shows performance in the 50/50 condition.…”

On the association between intention and visual word identification.

“…Critically, however, stimulus quality and SOA had additive effects on response time and on accuracy in both tasks 3 . This same critical pattern—additive effects of stimulus quality and SOA for both tasks—was also reported by Kahan et al (2011), again when the targets were all nonwords.…”

“…The data derived from nonword processing are quite clear: They support the conclusion that a task set must be in place before very early processing can begin (for task set with multiple tasks see Besner & Care, 2003;Kahan et al, 2011;Paulitzki et al, 2009; for letter search on the prime, see Ferguson & Besner, 2006). We know of no exceptions to the claim that the processing of nonwords across these paradigms requires a task set to be in place as a preliminary to target processing.…”