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A New Perspective On Visual Word Processing Efficiency, Joseph W. Houpt, James T. Townsend

Joseph W. Houpt

As a fundamental part of our daily lives, visual word processing has received much attention in the psychological literature. Despite the well established perceptual advantages of word and pseudoword context using accuracy, a comparable effect using response times has been elusive. Some researchers continue to question whether the advantage due to word context is perceptual. We use the capacity coefficient, a well established, response time based measure of efficiency to provide evidence of word processing as a particularly efficient perceptual process to complement those results from the accuracy domain.