Orthographic and phonological computation in visual word recognition: Evidence from backward masking in Hebrew

We employed the backward masking paradigm to map the early computation invo lved in the perception of printed words in Hebrew. By independently manipul ating orthographic and phonological overlap between targets and masks, we e xamined whether orthographic and phonological structure imposes late or ear ly constraints on lexical access. The results demonstrated that the probabi lity of reinstating a masked target depended on both the orthographic and t he phonological overlap between the target and the mask. However, whereas p honemic structure seems to constrain lexical access only at short exposure durations, orthographic overlap also exerts its influence at longer duratio ns.