Word recognition in Serbo-Croatian is phonologically analytic.

A lexical-decision task was conducted with bialphabetic readers of Serbo-Croatian. It was shown that letter strings that can be assigned both a Roman and a Cyrillic alphabet reading incur longer latencies than does the unique alphabet transcription of the same word. This within-word phonological-ambiguity effect was obtained for both words and pseudowords, but the effect was more exaggerated with words. In addition, the magnitude of the difference depended on the number and distribution of ambiguous characters in the ambiguous letter string. It was concluded that lexical decision in Serbo-Croatian necessarily involves a phonologically analytic strategy.