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When participants search for a target letter while reading for comprehension, they miss more instances if the target letter is embedded in frequent function words than in less frequent content words. This phenomenon, called the missing-letter effect, has been considered a window on the cognitive mechanisms involved in the visual processing of written language. In the present study, one group of participants read two texts for comprehension while searching for a target letter, and another group listened to a narration of the same two texts while listening for the target letter’s corresponding phoneme. The ubiquitous missing-letter effect was replicated and extended to a missing-phoneme effect. Item-based correlations between the reading and listening tasks were high, which led us to conclude that both tasks involve cognitive processes that reading and listening have in common and that both processes are rooted in psycholinguistically driven allocation of attention.

Christie and Klein [2005. Does attention cause illusory line motion? Perception & Psychophysics, 67(6), 1032–1043] published line motion ratings consistent with illusory line motion (ILM) after peripheral endogenous cues but not central arrow cues. When attention was directed endogenously on the basis of the shape of one of two peripherally presented objects, participants reported small, but significant motion away from the attended object, and this was attributed to participant bias, or to a peripherally directed object-based attention system endogenously recruited to differentiate the peripheral shapes. By using a unique cueing method with identical peripheral markers, but still allowing them to act as cues, the findings of Christie and Klein Experiment 4 were replicated. This reduces the likelihood that object discrimination or object attention mechanisms are responsible for the reported ILM-like effects.