Silent letters and phonological priming.

Many written English words contain silent letters. Omitting them produces nonwords pronounced identically to the original words, for example, SALM for PSALM and COLUM for COLUMN. We report two naming and two lexical decision experiments in which targets of 4-11 letters followed primes exposed for 100 ms in mask-prime-mask-target sequences. Priming in SALM-psalm and COLUM-column pairs exceeded priming in orthographic control pairs such as ASTA-pasta and COUSI-cousin, pairs in which pronounced letters are omitted to form the primes. SALM and COLUM, however, were less effective primes than PSALM and COLUMN. Results were discussed in terms of the phonological coherence hypothesis, the role of orthographic codes in filtering phonologically activated representations, and graphemes as reading units.