Lateral inhibition

Orthographic and phonological representations of words compete during processing. This competition is implemented in terms of lateral inhibition (Van Geffen, Hieselaar, & Dijkstra, in preparation). This is different from response competition, which can be seen as taking place at the decision level. Current simulations suggest that in order to account for the performance of interlingual homographs in some task contexts (e.g. Vanlangendonck, Peeters, Rueschemeyer, & Dijkstra, 2019), both lateral inhibition and response competition are required.