Automatic (prelexical) phonetic activation in silent word reading: Evidence from backward masking

Abstract

Visual access to a printed word may be accompanied by a very rapid activation of phonetic properties of the word as well as its constituent letters. We suggest that such automatic activation during word identification, rather than only postlexical recoding, routinely occurs in reading. To demonstrate such activation, we varied the graphemic and phonetic properties shared by a word target and a following pseudoword mask. Graphemic ( mard) and homophonic ( mayd) masks, equated for number of letters shared with a word target ( made), both showed a masking reduction effect relative to a control mask. There was an additional effect of the homophonic mask over the graphemic mask, attributable to phonetic activation. A second experiment verified this pattern of mask reduction effects using conditions that ruled out any explanation of the effect that does not take account of the target-mask relationship. We take the results to suggest that a phonetic activation nonoptionally occurs (prelexically) during lexical access.