ABSTRACT
This chapter describes advances both in the development of theory and in the accumulation of important data. It highlights these advances while pointing to areas needing further clarification. The chapter outlines the basic assumptions of serial versus interactive models of reading. It summarizes attempts to evaluate the speech specificity of the suppression decrement. The chapter focuses on context effects from different paradigms. When context interacts with a stimulus quality variable, does that mean that context is acting on the same early stage of encoding being influenced by the stimulus quality variable, or does it mean that stimulus quality variations require changes in the use of the processing system? In one of the more detailed descriptions of interactive processing during reading, David E. Rumelhart suggested an information-processing system consisting of several knowledge sources, each operating independently but all in parallel. Phoneme-monitoring tasks have also been used to question how prior context constrains the processing of words.
