Identity priming in English is compromised by phonological ambiguity

If it takes longer to achieve a single phonological representation for inco nsistent words (e.g., BOWL) than for consistent words (e.g., BENT), and if phonological coherence is pivotal to visual word recognition, then identity priming should depend on consistency. This hypothesis was evaluated in nam ing and lexical decision within a 4-field presentation sequence of mask-pri me-mask-target. The prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was either 114 or 244 ms (with prime durations, respectively, of 43 and 129 ms). Four experiments compared identity primes such as BOWL and BENT, which were equ ated, on average, for total number of friendly and unfriendly neighbors, bi gram frequency, and number of 1-letter-different neighbors. In both tasks, BENT primed itself better than BOWL primed itself with the difference being larger at the shorter SOA. Word processing is constrained primarily by the rate of achieving a coherent phonological code.