Can sentence context perceptually influence word recognition?
A major issue in the study of word perception concerns the nature (perceptual or nonperceptual) of sentence context effects. Professor Tim Jordan and colleagues compared effects of four contexts (legal, word replacement, nonword replacement, and transposed) on word recognition using the Reicher–Wheeler task to suppress nonperceptual influences of contextual and lexical constraint. Experiment 1 showed superior target word performance for legal (e.g., “it began to flap” versus “it began to flop”) over all other contexts, and for transposed over word replacement and nonword replacement contexts. Experiment 2 replicated these findings with higher constraint contexts (e.g., “the cellar is dark” versus “the cellar is dank”) and Experiment 3 showed that strong constraint contexts improved performance for congruent (e.g., “born to be wild”) but not incongruent (e.g., “born to be mild”) target words. These findings support the view that the very perception of words can be enhanced when words ar
