The time course of phonological, semantic, and orthographic coding in reading: Evidence from the fast-priming technique

The present experiment employed the fast-priming paradigm in reading (Seren o & Rayner, 1992), in which sentences are silently read while eye-movement- contingent changes are made on a specified target region. In this paradigm, when readers fixate on a specified target word region, a prime word is enc ountered for a brief duration at the beginning of the fixation and then it is replaced by a target word. Three types of primes were employed: homophon es, semantically related, and orthographically similar, and five prime dura tions were employed: 29, 32, 35, 38, and 41 msec. The primary finding was t hat significant homophone priming was obtained at prime durations ranging f rom 29 to 35 msec,whereas significant semantic priming occurred only at the 32-msec prime duration. In contrast, significant orthographic priming occu rred at all prime durations. These findings indicate that phonological code s are activated during an eye fixation at least as rapidly as semantic code s. An explanation for the pattern of events is suggested using the framewor k of an activation-verification model.