Further evidence for phonological constraints on visual lexical access: TOWED primes FROG

If the phonological codes of visually presented words are assembled rapidly and automatically for use in lexical access, then words that sound alike should induce similar activity within the internal lexicon. TOWED is homophonous with TOAD, which is semantically related to FROG, and BEACH is homophonous with BEECH, which is semantically related to TREE. Stimuli such as these were used in priming-of-naming task, in which words homophonous with associates of the target words preceded the targets at an onset asynchrony of 100 msec. Relative to spelling controls (TROD, BENCH), the low-frequency TOWED and the high-frequency BEACH speeded up the naming of FROG and TREE, respectively, to the same degree. This result was discussed in relation to the accumulating evidence for the primacy of phonological constraints in visual lexical access.