the two popular models claiming to explain the wse are the interactive activation model (iam) and the dual-route coding model (drc) neither of these models takes attention into account; this is a relationship looked into through research on the wse. evidence shows that the wse persists without an observer’s conscious awareness of the word presented, which implies that attention is neither necessary for wse nor involved in this phenomenon. however, attentional focus has been demonstrated to modulate the wse which agrees with recent neurophysiological data explaining that attention, in fact, modulates early stages of word processing.