The attentional control of lexical processing pathways: Reversing the word frequency effect

Abstract

In two experiments, we investigated the influence of word frequency in speeded word naming and in a relatively novel regularization task in which participants were required to pronounce words on the basis of spelling-to-sound correspondences instead of giving their normal pronunciations (e.g., pronounce pint so that it rhymes with hint). Participants were presented high- and low-frequency regular words and exception words, along with a set of nonwords. The results indicated that there was a norreal word frequency effect (i.e., high-frequency words faster than low-frequency words) in the standard speeded naming task, whereas, for the regularization task, the word frequency effect was reversed for regular words, even though the regular words were pronounced in an identical fashion in both the norreal naming and the regularization tasks. This reversal of the word frequency effect was not obtained for the exception words. The discussion focuses on the implication of these results for attentional control models of lexical processing.