Six experiments are reported which examine the assertion that phonological recoding for the purpose of lexical access in visual word recognition is prevented or impaired by concurrent articulation ("articulatory suppression"). The first section of this paper selectively reviews the literature, and reports two experiments which fail to replicate previous work.The third experiment contrasts performance with visually presented words and with non-words. Latency measures show an effect of suppression that is specific to words, whilst error rates show an effect common to both words and non-words.The fourth experiment shows that if the task is changed from a judgement of rhyme (BLAME-FLAME) to one of homophony (AIL-ALE), the suppression effect seen in the latency data is eliminated, whilst error effects remain. It is suggested that, in addition to producing error effects that are not easily interpretable, suppression prevents or impairs a phonological segmentation process operating subsequent to the retrieval of whole word phonology (a process that is needed for rhyme judgement but not for one of homophony).Experiment V shows that while suppression has no effect on the time taken to decide if printed non-words sound like real words (e.g. PALLIS), error rates increase. Experiment VI shows that suppression has no effect on either R T or errors in the same task if subjects suppress at a slower rate than in Experiment V. Buffer storage and/or maintenance of phonologically coded information derived from print is affected by suppression; phonological recoding from print for the purpose of lexical access can be carried out without any interference from suppression.It is suggested that there are at least two different phonological codes.

Two experiments on the identification of ideographs are reported. In Expt 1 subjects showed a right visual field advantage when reporting Arabic numerals. A right visual field advantage was also obtained in Expt 2 when Chinese and Japanese subjects reported numbers presented in Arabic and Kanji formats. The results are discussed in the context of the literature which shows a left visual field advantage for the identification of single ideographs in Chinese and Japanese, and a right visual field advantage for items in alphabetic and syllabic scripts. It is suggested that it is not the direct mapping between ideographs and the morphemes of a language which yields a left visual field advantage, but associated incidental stimulus characteristics which make demands upon preprocessing operations that are carried out more efficiently in the right hemisphere. It is argued, therefore, that this literature does not address the question of whether, subsequent to preprocessing, alphabetic, syllabic and ideographic scripts are processed by dissociable mechanisms.