The interaction of sentence context and perceptual analysis in word identification

The influence of sentence context on word identification has, in some interactive models, been attributed to enhanced accuracy or speed of perceptual analysis. This view is challenged by two experiments in which contextually enhanced word identification was found only when a target’s relevance to the sentence context was correlated with its presence. When this constraint was removed by using contextually relevant foils, accuracy in detecting words in normal and scrambled sentences did not differ reliably. Moreover, under conditions that constituted a negative correlation between target relevance and presence, word identification was more accurate with scrambled than with normal sentences. These results are consistent with models of sentence context effects that are based on the assumptions that (1) perceptual analysis proceeds independently of contextual analysis, and (2) the results of these analyses are integrated to determine a word’s identity.