Evidence for an automatic orthographic code in the processing of visually novel word forms

Some psycholinguistic theorists contend that lexical representations are intrinsically phonological, and that visual word recognition requires the matching of orthographic information to core phonological representations, while others postulate that in skilled readers orthographic and phonological representations attain a more equivalent status. We provide evidence for the latter position, showing that an automatically accessible orthographic representation for a phonologically familiar word can be established prior to any visual encounter with that word. We trained subjects with the phonology of unfamiliar words and then included them in orthographic form among the targets in a masked-priming lexical decision task. We showed a pattern of priming for these words at the first visual encounter consistent with under-specified orthographic representations. Repeated presentation in the lexical decision context did not change this pattern of priming, suggesting that a more detailed or semantic analysis might be necessary for these representations to become as specific as those for familiar words.