In 9 experiments, a target word (e.g., frog) was named following an associate (TOAD), or a word (e.g., TOWED) or nonword (e.g., TODE) homophonic with the associate. At brief (e.g., 50 ms) stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs), the 3 primes produced equal associative priming. At a long SOA (250 ms), priming by TOAD was matched by TODE but not by TOWED. Equal priming at brief SOAs by the 3 primes and no priming by orthographic controls (TOLD, TORD) suggests that lexical access is initially phonological. TOWED priming less than TODE at SOA = 250 ms suggests that phonologically activated representations whose input orthography does not match the addressed spelling (available only for words) are eventually suppressed. Phonological constraints on lexical access precede and set the stage for orthographic constraints.

Seven experiments were conducted that examined phonological and orthographic priming of naming using three- and four-field masking procedures with prolonged targets. Experiments 1-3 found significant phonological priming by homophones (TOWED-toad) that was independent of prime identifiability and prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA; 30, 60, or 250 ms). Subsequent experiments found significant phonological priming by pseudohomophones (TODE-toad) that was similarly independent of prime identifiability and SOA. Collectively, the limited effects of orthographic control primes (TOLD-toad, TODS-toad) and the pronounced and orthographically independent effects of phonological primes suggest (a) a leading role in visual word perception for a fast-acting, automatic, assembled phonology, and (b) a phonological basis, rather than an abstract graphemic basis, for the processing equivalency of letter variations.

Four experiments were conducted with pseudohomophones in a primed naming task. In Experiments 1 and 2, target pseudowords that sounded like real words, for example, CHARE, were preceded either by context words that related associatively to the word with which the target was homophonic, TABLE-CHARE, or by context words that were not associatively related, NOVEL-CHARE. Control pairs were TABLE-THARE and NOVEL-THARE (Experiment 1) and TABLE-CHARK and NOVEL-CHARK (Experiment 2). The prior presentation of TABLE relative to the prior presentation of NOVEL benefited the naming of CHARE but not the naming ofTHARE or CHARK. The third experiment placed pseudohomophones• in the role of primes, that is, TAYBLE-CHAIR, with such pairs comprising only 8% of all pairs seen by a subject in order to counter guessing strategies. If the prime TAYBLE activated /tablet, then Ichairl would be activated associatively and the target CHAIR would be named faster than if TARBLE was the prime. This result was obtained. The fourth experiment extended the design of the third to include TABLE-CHAIR pairs and a comparison of a short (280 ms) and a long (500 ms) delay between context and target onsets. The priming due to associated pseudohomophones was unaffected by onset asynchrony and equal in magnitude to that due to associated words. The overall pattern of results suggests that lexical representations are coded phonologically and accessed phonologically.

The lexical representation of Serbo-Croatian nouns was investigated in a lexical decision task. Because Serbo-Croatian nouns are declined, a noun may appear in one of several grammatical cases distinguished by the inflectional morpheme affixed to the base form. The grammatical cases occur with different frequencies, although some are visually and phonetically identical. When the frequencies of identical forms are compounded, the ordering of frequencies is not the same for masculine and feminine genders. These two genders are distinguished further by the fact that the base form for masculine nouns is an actual grammatical case, the nominative singular, whereas the base form for feminine nouns is an abstraction in that it cannot stand alone as an independent word. Exploiting these characteristics of the SerboCroatian language, we contrasted three views of how a noun is represented: (1) the independententries hypothesis, which assumes an independent representation for each grammatical case, reflecting its frequency of occurrence; (2) the derivational hypothesis, which assumes that only the base morpheme is stored, with the individual cases derived from separately stored inflectional morphemes and rules for combination; and (3) the satellite-entries hypothesis, which assumes that all cases are individually represented, with the nominative singular functioning as the nucleus and the embodiment of the noun's frequency and around which the other cases cluster uniformly. The evidence strongly favors the satellite-entries hypothesis.Inflection is the major grammatical device of SerboCroatian, Yugoslavia's principal language. In general, the grammatical cases of nouns are formed by adding a suffix to a root morpheme, where the suffix is of the vowel, vowel-consonant, or vowel-consonant-vowel type. Less frequently, inflection involves additional processes, such as vowel deletion and consonant palatalization.The grammatical cases of Serbo-Croatian nouns produced by inflection are not equal in their frequency of occurrence. Table I summarizes the frequency analysis of D. Kostic (1965) on a corpus of approximately 2 million Serbo-Croatian words appearing in the daily press and contemporary poetry. The nonitalicized numbers are actual percentages. Thus, for all nouns in the corpus, 12.83% were masculine nouns in the nominative singular, 7.8% were feminine nouns in the genitive singular, .13% were neuter nouns in the instrumental plural, and so on. Reading the totals, we

Ten experiments were conducted on visually presented Serbo-Croatian words and pseudowords, comprising phonemically similar and dissimilar context-target sequences. There were five main results. First, phonemic similarity effects in both lexical decision and naming are independent of graphemic similarity. Second, phonemic similarity need not facilitate lexical decision; the direction of its effect depends on lexicality, target frequency, and type of similarity (specifically, the position of the phoneme that distinguishes context and target). Third, phonemic similarity expedites the naming of words and pseudowords, and to the same degree. Fourth, phonemic similarity is negated in naming, but not in lexical decision, when the visually presented context and target are stressed differently. Fifth, the phonemic similarity effect occurs even when the context is a masked pseudoword. These results are discussed in terms of a model in which wordprocessing units are activated routinely by phoneme-processing units, and in which compositionally similar word units, when activated, inhibit one another in proportion to each's familiarity. In this model, the phonemic similarity effect in naming is based on the states of phoneme units, whereas the phonemic similarity effect in lexical decision is based on the states of word units. Overall, the results comport with an account in which phonology is computed prelexically and automatically.