A widespread view in cognition is that once acquired through extensive practice, mental skills such as reading are automatic. Lexical and semantic analyses of single words are said to be uncontrollable in the sense that they cannot be prevented. Over the past 60 years, apparently convincing support for this assumption has come from hundreds of experiments in which skilled readers have processed an irrelevant word in the Stroop task despite explicit instructions not to, even when so doing would hurt color identification performance. This basic effect was replicated in two experiments, which also showed that a considerable amount of semantic processing is locally controlled by elements of the task. For example, simply coloring a single letter instead of the whole word eliminated the Stroop effect. This outcome flies in the face of any automaticity account in which specified processes cannot be prevented from being set in motion, but it is consistent with the venerable idea that mental set is a powerful determinant of performance. 221Many low-level human behaviors are automatic, in that a stimulus serves to elicit the behavior in the absence of conscious awareness or intention (e.g., an eye blink in response to a puff of air; the patellar reflex; the Babinski reflex), Learned behaviors such as reading are also widely argued to be automatic in a similar sense. For example, it is well established that identifying the color of an incongruent word (e.g., green letters spelling the word "red") is slower than identifying the color of a congruent word (e.g., green letters spelling the word "green"). This Stroop effect (Stroop, 1935) and its many variants have been explored empirically, theoretically, and computationally by cognitive and developmental psychologists, psycholinguists, neuropsychologists, and cognitive scientists in more than 500 papers over the past 60 years (see MacLeod's 1991 review). A core assumption of virtually all the theoretical accounts is that skilled readers process the irrelevant word without consciousness or intent. Reading the word is said to be automatic in the sense that readers cannot refrain from computing the meaning of the word despite explicit instructions not to do SO:I Reading is such an automatic process that it is difficult to inhibit and it will interfere with processing other information about the word.

Two lexical-decision experiments examined the influence of relatedness proportion (RP. the proportion of word-context-word-target trials sharing a semantic relation) and context-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) on the typically observed interaction between the effects of context and stimulus quality. The standard overadditive interaction of context effects being larger for response times (RTs) to degraded than to nondegraded targets was observed when RP was .50. In contrast, additive effects of context and stimulus quality on RT were observed when RP was .25. These effects were seen at both 200-ms and 800-ms SOAs, even though context effects increased with increasing RP only at the 800-ms SOA. These results (a) undermine the view that expectancy is responsible for producing the standard overadditive Context x Stimulus Quality interaction, (b) delineate conditions under which context and stimulus quality have additive and interactive effects on RT, and (c) show that RP has 2 dissociable effects on semantic context effects. These data were collected while Jennifer A. Stolz was at the University of Albany, and the article was prepared while Jennifer A. Stolz was at the University of Waterloo. The data were presented at the 33rd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society in Washington. DC.We thank Derek Besner and David Balota for helpful discussion. We also thank Ron Borowsky and Annette de Groot.

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or dbesner@watarts. uwaterloo.ca. 1 We do not like the term semantic priming because it is associated with a particular mechanism thought to underlie the effect. Given that it has been used extensively throughout the literature we use it (reluctantly) to minimize misunderstanding.2 In Morton's (1969) conceptualization, a logogen contains no semantic or associative information and has no direct links to other logogens.

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An intersection of three literatures (skilled word recognition, spatial attention, and the Stroop effect) is addressed in a series of four experiments, The results, in conjunction with other observations, are taken to suggest that (1) the default value for spatial attention in visual word recognition is distributed across the word, (2) preening a single letter position serves to narrow the focus of spatial attention, and (3) this reduces or prevents activation in the word recognition system, Consequently, the Stroop effect is reduced in magnitude or eliminated, depending on details ofthe context. Contrary to the widespread view that it reflects automatic processing, the Stroop effect is better conceptualized as reflecting the action of default settings in the word recognition and attentional systems. Some relations between consciousness, context, and control are noted.It is clear that mental skill acquired through high levels of practice confers benefits on the performer. For example, skilled performance in a domain such as word recognition is much faster and less error prone than unskilled performance. A more contentious claim is that this speed-up carries a cost; skilled readers are said to be unable to prevent lexical and semantic analyses of words, provided that the stimulus is clear enough, bright enough, large enough, and presented for a sufficiently long duration for the reader to process it. The most famous example, provided in many papers, chapters, and textbooks, in support ofthis assertion is the Stroop effect (Stroop, 1935; see also MacLeod's, 1991, review). When skilled readers are asked to identify the print color of a word and explicitly instructed not to read the word, they are nonetheless typically slower and more error prone when the word references an incongruent color (e.g., the word red printed in green), as compared with the time taken to identify the color when the word references a congruent color (e.g., the word red printed in red) or a noncolor term (e.g., the word pen printed in green). Word recognition, thus, is widely viewed as automatic, in the sense that it occurs without intent and cannot be prevented (see, e.g., Anderson, 1995;Ashcraft, 1994;Crowder & Wagner, 1992;Posner & Snyder, 1975;Rayner & Pollatsek, 1989;Reisberg, 1997).One difficulty with this account of mental skill as being exemplified by the Stroop effect is that it is unwarranted. It is one thing to show that skilled readers sometimes process the word despite being instructed not to but quite another to conclude that word recognition is therefore automatic, in the sense that lexical and semantic analyThis research was supported by Grants A0998. OGP0183905. and EQPO187220 from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Council of Canada. We thank R. S. McCann for comments on a draft of the manuscript and K. Rayner. B. A. Levy. and R. Klein for their reviews. Address correspondence to D. Besner, Department of Psychology. University of Waterloo. Waterloo, ON N2L 3G 1, Canada (e-mail: dbesner@ watarts. uwaterloo .ca).ses of a wo...

A robust semantic priming effect typically occurs in visual word recognition if the prime is read before a response to the target. However, this effect is dramatically reduced if a letter search is performed on the prime prior to responding to the target. Three lexical decision experiments document the new observation that morphological priming is preserved following letter search on the prime. This dissociation between morphological and semantic priming following letter search can be understood in the context of an interactive activation framework. In addition, the implications of these results for connectionist and compound cue accounts of word recognition, as well as the issue of automaticity in word recognition, are discussed.

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