Word perception and misperception in context.

When reading lists of words and nonwords at 100 ms/word, Ss reported words accurately but frequently converted nonwords such as dack into similarly spelled words such as duck or deck. In sentences, both nonwords and anomalous words were misread as appropriate words, but the bias was greater for nonwords. Word associations in lists (e.g., sailor-dack-vessel) produced a similar bias, but when sentence meaning was pitted against such associations the lexical effect was largely overridden. Sentences in which biasing context appeared only after the critical item reduced but did not eliminate the context effect, suggesting that multiple word candidates remained active while at least the next 3 words were processed. These results support a 2-stage modular interactive model: The first stage is stimulus driven and emits multiple weighted candidates that are combined interactively with contextual information in a second stage. In reading or listening to discourse, up to five or six words may be perceived and understood per second: a remarkable cognitive feat. Although one might think that processing language simultaneously at several levels—discriminating letters or phonemes, identifying words, parsing and interpreting