Reading isolated words: no evidence for automatic incorporation of the phonetic code

Backward masking with a homophonic mask induces better target recognition than backward masking with a graphemic mask that shares the same letters with the target as the homophonic mask. From this, the existence of automatic prelexical phonological recoding in silent word reading has been inferred. The present experiments, however, show that the advantage of homophonic masks in a backward-masking task only arises if a considerable proportion of the masks are phonologically related to the targets (at least for Dutch). The results are in line with findings of lexical-decision tasks and number-processing tasks, and constitute a further argument for the dominance of the orthographic route over the phonological route in processing isolated written words.