VISUAL AND ASSOCIATIVE FACTORS IN PROCESSING SERBO-CROATIAN WORDS

A recent report of an association x stimulus quality interaction in Sp anish was construed as support for the use of the lexical route in wor d recognition in a shallow orthography (Bajo, Burton, Burton, & Canas, 1994). Because the interaction occurred against the backdrop of laten cies in excess of 1 sec (and was not replicated in Bajo and co-workers ' second experiment), the results must be considered equivocal. A nami ng experiment in Serbo-Croatian, a similarly shallow orthography which has not shown the interaction heretofore, focused on stimulus onset a synchrony (SOA) of prime and target. The interaction was absent at an SOA of 600 msec, replicating our previous results, but was reliable at an SOA of 40 msec. A second experiment in Serbo-Croatian followed Baj o and co-workers' experiments in that the task was lexical decision an d the SOA was 800 msec. The experiment's primary feature was the use o f phonologically ambiguous targets to enhance clean-up processes poten tially responsible for the interaction. No interaction was observed in either the latency or error measures. The results are discussed in re lation to dual-route theory and the phonological coherence hypothesis, and in relation to possible differences among the English, Spanish an d Serbo-Croatian orthographies.