e., surface features PCI-32765 molecular weight of the word, relating to our hypothesized process of wordhood assessment). Furthermore, subjects are better able to detect nonword errors when the intended word is low frequency (e.g., sleat for sleet) than when it is high frequency (e.g., grean for green; Van Orden, 1991; see also Holbrook, 1978b and Jared et al., 1999), suggesting that subjects are more likely to coerce an errorful letter string into a real word if it is similar to a high frequency word (wordhood assessment and form validation may have been rushed and performed too cursorily). Less

detectable are wrong word errors ( Daneman and Stainton, 1993 and Levy et al., 1986), which moreover show differences in the contribution of phonological similarity to

the intended word: homophone substitutions (e.g., mail for male) are less detectable than spelling control substitutions (e.g., mile; Banks et al., 1981 and Jared buy Bioactive Compound Library et al., 1999), potentially implicating that phonological status may mediate content access. Perhaps in addition, it may be the case that spelling uncertainty, which coincides with homophony, mediates content access. The proofreading studies mentioned above generally focused on detection of errors, in terms of accuracy and detection time and can only tell us about whether or not proofreading was successful, not about how it modulated fundamental component processes of reading. A deeper Selleckchem Osimertinib understanding of this latter issue requires investigating how the reading of error-free words and sentences is affected by the instructions to look

for errors. The most direct assessment of this comes from the aforementioned study by Kaakinen and Hyönä (2010). They had native Finnish speakers perform two tasks with Finnish sentences: first, they read sentences for comprehension, answering occasional comprehension questions; then, they performed a proofreading task, in which they checked for misspellings of words that produced nonwords. They analyzed reading measures on sentences that did not contain errors, but did contain a frequency manipulation (as well as a length manipulation), finding an interaction between the frequency effect and task: frequency effects for gaze durations were larger in proofreading (141 ms for long words and 79 ms for short words) than in reading for comprehension (81 ms for long words and 30 ms for short words). They concluded that their task emphasized orthographic checking, which depends on word frequency (i.e., can be done faster when the word is more familiar). There are two possible interpretations of Kaakinen and Hyönä’s (2010) results. One is that, as suggested by Kaakinen and Hyönä, word processing works qualitatively differently in proofreading than in reading for comprehension. This account implies that readers can flexibly change how they read in response to task demands.