8On the Early Influence of Meaning in Word Recognition: A Review of the Literature

David A. BalotaF. Richard FerraroLisa T. ConnorWashington University

The prominent view of visual word recognition theorists is that readers must first match the visual stimulus to some internal representation before meaning of the stimulus word becomes available. Very simply, a word must be recognized before its meaning can be accessed. For example, in Morton’s classic logogen model (Morton, 1969), word recognition devices (logogens) must receive sufficient activation via featural detectors before the word is identified. The meaning of the word does not become available before this theoretical threshold has been reached (see Becker, 1980; Forster, 1979; Norris, ...

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