Attention, awareness, and hemispheric differences in word recognition.

-When subjects attend to the task of naming a briefly presented picture, their naming latencies are affected by a word presented by the side of the picture whether they are able to recognise the word or not. For unreported words the effect is stronger with related than with unrelated words, but this is reversed for words which enter awareness. Moreover, this relationship is largely a left hemisphere function. Two levels of interference are apparent in this experiment: an effect of related words which retard the picture naming latency, which operates at a pre-attentive stage of processing, and a further effect of phonemic or articulatory competition which operates as the identity of the printed word is available to awareness.