Basic processes in reading: can functional phonological recoding be blocked?

A widely held view is that phonological processing is always involved in lexical access from print, and is automatic in that it cannot be prevented. This claim was assessed in the context of a priming paradigm. In Experiment 1, repetition priming was observed for both pseudohomophone-word pairs (e.g., brane-brain) and morphologically related word pairs (e.g., marked-mark) in the context of lexical decision. In Experiment 2, subjects searched the prime for the presence of a target letter and then made a lexical decision to a subsequent letter string. Phonological priming from a pseudohomophone was eliminated following letter search of the prime, whereas morphological priming persisted. These results are inconsistent with the claim that a) lexical access from print requires preliminary phonological processing, and b) functional phonological processing cannot be blocked. They are, however, consistent with the conclusion that, for intact skilled readers, lexical access can be accomplished on the basis of orthographic processing alone. These results join a growing body of evidence supporting the claim that there exist numerous points in visual word recognition at which processing can be stopped.