Lexical embeddings produce interference when they are morphologically unrelated to the words in which they are contained: Evidence from eye movements.

Many words in the English language contain semantically and morphologically unrelated smaller words (e.g., room in groom). Recent findings indicate that a high frequency embedded word produces interference during visual word identification (e.g., Bowers, Davis, & Hanley, 2005; Davis, Perea, & Acha, 2009; Davis & Taft, 2005). In an eye movement experiment we examined whether lexical embeddings produce interference even when explicit judgments about lexicality or category membership are not solicited. Participants silently read sentences that each contained a target word with a lexical embedding. Fixation times were longer on target words that contained a higher frequency embedding compared to those that contained a lower frequency embedding. This finding indicates that a high frequency embedding interferes with word identification during silent reading and adds to a growing body of evidence that a word's orthographic neighborhood includes embedded words.