Allocation of attention during visual word recognition.

A dual-task paradigm was used to assess attentional processing demands during visual word recognition. By manipulating the difficulty of each task, it is argued that the procedure estimates the attention demands of the memory-access component of word recognition. Specifically, the the complexity of the secondary task was varied from a simple reaction time task to a choice reaction time task, and the difficulty of a lexical decision (word vs. nonword) primary task was varied by manipulating word frequency. A comparison of the effect of secondary task complexity across levels of word frequency showed that the difference between the two secondary tasks was larger for low-frequency words than for high-frequency words. This result, supported by other characteristics of the data, suggests that the memory-access processing in one type of word recognition task does demand attention.