Interaction of visual and cognitive effects in word recognition

D. E. Meyer et al (1975, 1976) report that semantic context has a larger effect on visually degraded words than on undegraded words. A series of 4 experiments were conducted with 54 undergraduates to explore alternative explanations of this result. Using stimulus intensity instead of dot-pattern degradation, it was found that semantic context interacted with intensity in 2 different word recognition tasks. In 2 other studies, it was found that intensity and word-frequency effects were additive. Alternative models of the word recognition process are evaluated against these results. (20 ref)