Dissociating automatic orthographic and phonological codes in lexical access and lexical acquisition

Since the seminal work of Forster and Davis (1984), the masked priming technique has been employed to measure a variety of automatic information processes contributing to word recognition performance, most often using a lexical decision task as an index of word recognition. In this chapter we describe work using a masked priming paradigm with two tasks, both variants of the standard lexical decision task, to dissociate automatic orthographic and phonological mechanisms in word recognition. We also show that repeated testing with the same set of subjects and the same set of prime-target pairs might offer a probe for the formation of orthographically based lexical representations, and for the relative contributions of orthographic and phonological mechanisms to this process.