An independence of mechanism in the origins of reading and classification-related semantic distance effects

Some members of prespecified classes are accepted as members more rapidly than others. This has normally been ascribed to processes operating at a stage where the members are evaluated with respect to the category. An alternative locus could be at an “encoding” stage. It is shown with two experiments that this seems most unlikely, and evidence emerges to support the idea that word-naming and classification tasks show a crucial independence of process. It would seem to be necessary to reevaluate any simplistic notions of processing stages in semantic verification tasks.