Phonologic and orthographic routes in word processing

There is a debate as to whether phonological representations are always activated during lexical access, or whether silent reading may rely on activating only orthographic representations. Previous studies mostly focused on homophonous lexemes, while we provide novel evidence in favour of the former from two self-paced reading experiments with homophonous and homographic forms of Russian nouns. We show that homophony affects processing by creating mild grammaticality illusions, while homography does not.