Now you see it, now you don't: Flanker presence induces the word concreteness effect

Aaron Vandendaele,Jonathan Grainger

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104945

Abstract

Can the presence of unrelated flanker words change the way that lexical decisions are made to target words in the flankers task? Here we examined the impact of flanker presence on the effects of word concreteness. Target words had high or low concreteness ratings (e.g., fork, free) and were either presented in isolation or flanked to the left and right by an unrelated word (e.g., cold free cold) that was irrelevant for the task. Results revealed that the facilitatory effect of concreteness (faster responses to concrete words compared with abstract words) was significantly greater in the presence of flankers. A control experiment revealed the same pattern with pseudoword and nonword flankers. We conclude that the mere presence of flanking letter strings causes a greater depth of processing of target words. We further speculate that this might arise by flankers inducing a more “sentence-like” context by the presence of multiple, spatially distinct letter strings, that prohibits the use of more superficial decision processes and can be used to make lexical decisions to isolated words.

Highlights

Several recent studies have adopted the flanker paradigm as a means to bridge the gap between the two relatively independent lines of research on single-word reading on the one hand and sentence reading on the other
We report b-values, standard errors (SEs) and t- or z-values, with those beyond |1.96| deemed as significant (b-values and SEs were multiplied by a fixed factor to increase interpretability)
In order to account for possible effects of block order, each model included a predictor indicating if participants saw the isolated target or the flanker condition first

Summary

Introduction

Several recent studies have adopted the flanker paradigm as a means to bridge the gap between the two relatively independent lines of research on single-word reading on the one hand and sentence reading on the other (see Snell & Grainger, 2019, for an overview) In this version of the flanker task, participants respond to central target words that are flanked to the left and to the right by stimuli that are irrelevant for the task. The results of this line of research were foundational with respect to the development of a theoretical framework that integrates word identifi cation processes in an account of sentence-level processing and specifies how different word identities can be simultaneously mapped onto distinct spatiotopic locations during reading (Snell, Meeter, & Grainger, 2017; Snell, van Leipsig, Grainger, & Meeter, 2018)

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Conclusion