Word Superiority Effect - Models

Models

The two popular models claiming to explain the WSE are the interactive activation model (IAM) and the dual-route coding model (DRC) Neither of these models takes attention into account; This is a relationship looked into through research on the WSE. Evidence shows that the WSE persists without an observer’s conscious awareness of the word presented, which implies that attention is neither necessary for WSE nor involved in this phenomenon. However, attentional focus has been demonstrated to modulate the WSE which agrees with recent neurophysiological data explaining that attention, in fact, modulates early stages of word processing.

The Activation-Verification Model (AVM) is another model that was developed to account for reaction time data from lexical decision and naming tasks. The basic operations explored in the AVM that are involved in word and letter recognition are encoding, verification, and decision Both the IAM and the AVM share many basic assumptions such as the factthat stimulus input activates spatially -specific letter units, that activated letter units, modulate the activity of word units, and that letter and word recognition are frequently affected by top-down processes (e.g. Reading the phrase "A cow says…" a person would guess "moo" and in checking that the word begins with ‘m’ ignores the rest of the letters)