Phonological codes are used to access the lexicon during silent reading

Readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences containing 1 m ember of a homophonic heterograph pair (e.g., soul-sole) or an unambiguous frequency- and length-matched control word. Prior context was either semant ically neutral (Experiment 1) or semantically biasing (Experiment 2). The m eaning dominance and word frequency of the heterographic targets were manip ulated such that half were balanced and half were biased, and half were hig h frequency and half were low frequency. The processing pattern for both hi gh- and low-frequency heterographs mirrored the pattern commonly observed f or lexically ambiguous words. These findings are consistent with models of word recognition in which phonological codes activate word meaning for both high- and low-frequency words.