Research on group differences in response latency often has as its goal the detection of Group x Treatment interactions. However, accumulating evidence suggests that response latencies for different groups are often linearly related, leading to an increased likelihood of finding spurious overadditive interactions in which the slower group produces a larger treatment effect. The authors propose a rate-amount model that predicts linear relationships between individuals and that includes global processing parameters based on large-scale group differences in information processing. These global processing parameters may be used to linearly transform response latencies from different individuals to a common information-processing scale so that small-scale group differences in information processing may be isolated. The authors recommend linear regression and z-score transformations that may be used to augment traditional analyses of raw response latencies.

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In two experiments the allocation of attention during the recognition of ambiguous and unambiguous words was investigated. In Experiment 1, separate groups performed either lexical decision, auditory probe detection, or their combination. In the combined condition probes occurred 90, 180, or 270 ms following the onset of the lexical-decision target. Lexical decisions and probe responses were fastest for ambiguous words, followed by unambiguous words and pseudowords, respectively, which indicated that processing ambiguous words was less attention demanding than unambiguous words or pseudowords. Attention demands decreased across the timecourse of word recognition for all stimulus types. In Experiment 2, one group performed the lexical-decision task alone, whereas another group performed the lexical-decision task during the retention interval of a short-term memory task. The results were consistent with those from Experiment 1 and showed that word recognition is an attention-demanding process and that the demands are inversely related to the number of meanings of the stimulus. These results are discussed with regard to the structure of the mental lexicon (i.e., single vs. multiple lexical entries) and the effect of such a structure on attentional mechanisms.

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Milwaukee Analyses of lexical decision studies revealed that (a) older (O) adults' mean semantic priming effect was 1.44 times that of younger (Y) adults, (b) regression lines describing the relations between older and younger adults' latencies in related (O = 1.54 Y-112) and unrelated conditions (O = 1.50 Y-93) were not significantly different, and (c) that there was a proportional relation between older and younger adults' priming effects (O = 1.48 Y-2). Analyses of word-naming studies yielded similar results. Analyses of delayed pronunciation data (Balota & Duchek, 1988) revealed that word recognition was 1.47 times slower in older adults, whereas older adults' output processes were only 1.26 times slower. Overall, analyses of whole latencies and durations of component processes provide converging evidence for a general slowing factor of approximately 1.5 for lexical information processing.