UNINTENTIONAL READING - CAN PHONOLOGICAL COMPUTATION BE CONTROLLED

A common view in the reading literature is that words' are often recog nized by recourse to phonological recoding. The question addressed her e concerns whether phonological recoding can be controlled, or whether it is computed (a) even when it is completely irrelevant to the task, and (b) can only hurt performance. Two Stroop type experiments are re ported in which participants used a key press to indicate the print co lour of an (irrelevant) letter string that sounded like a colour word (e.g., BLOO). The sound of the colour ''word'' was always incongruent with the required response. Colour identification performance was impa ired by the irrelevant letter strings relative to two baseline conditi ons. These results and others are consistent with the conclusion that a phonological code is computed under a variety of circumstances.