A new perspective on visual word processing efficiency

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 comple-ment those results from the accuracy domain. Due to the relative ease with which most adults read, it is reasonable to assume that word perception is an efficient process. This is further supported by the intuition that with more ex-perience with a process we become more efficient and we are quite experienced with the written word. Often, the efficiency is measured using single letter perception as a base line. When word context offers an advantage in the accuracy or processing time of perceiving a letter, this sup-ports the claim that word perception is efficient. From the early days of experimental psychology, researchers have been intereste