Where are the effects of frequency in visual word recognition tasks? Right where we said they were! Comment on Monsell, Doyle, and Haggard (1989).

Balota and Chumbley's studies led them to conclude that category verification, lexical decision, and pronunciation tasks involve combinations of processes that cause them to produce differing estimates of the relation between word frequency and ease of lexical identification. Monsell, Doyle, and Haggard challenged Balota and Chumbley's empirical evidence and conclusions, provided empirical evidence to support their challenge, and presented an alternative theoretical position. We show that Monsell et al.'s experiments, analyses, and theoretical perspective do not result in conclusions about the role of word frequency in category verification, lexical decision, and pronunciation that differ from those of Balota and Chumbley.