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The author investigated the role of phonological neighborhood on visual word recognition. Using a lexical decision task, the author showed in Experiment 1 that words with large phonological neighborhoods were processed more rapidly than those with smaller phonological neighborhoods. This facilitative effect was obtained even when the nonword fillers had the same number of phonological neighbors as the words. This finding indicates that phonological neighbors speed processing within the phonological system. In the next 2 experiments, this claim was further tested using the naming and semantic categorization tasks. In both experiments, the effect of phonological neighborhood was found to be facilitative. The results across all 3 experiments indicate that phonology is central to visual word recognition and that phonological neighborhood provides a reliable measure of phonological processing.

We examined whether the processing of words associated with distinct spatial locations automatically biases behavior toward these locations in space. In four experiments (Ns = 30, 34, 32, 32), participants were shown stimuli denoting objects typically associated with the upper and lower regions of visual space. In Experiment 1, words were categorized as man-made or natural by pressing one of two vertically arranged keys. Reaction times were faster for trials in which response locations were congruent with the stimulus-associated locations. Experiment 2 replicated the stimulus-response congruency effect when the stimuli were presented in a pictorial format. Stimuli-space interactions therefore seem to be driven by an automatic activation of the spatial attributes associated with the stimuli, irrespective of input format. In Experiments 3 and 4, a target detection task involving only one response button was employed to examine whether the effects observed in the first two experiments were due to attentional shifts, independent of response selection processes. In both experiments, the previously observed congruence effect between words and space either diminished or vanished completely. Consequently, the results of the four experiments in the current study point to a dominant role of response-selection processes in the genesis of space-object word interactions.