Abstract
In a study designed to test whether the meaning of printed words is perceived directly or by means of phonetic recoding, subjects named pictures on which words or nonwords were superimposed as distractors. In a Stroop task of this kind, the meanings of distractor words which conflict with the names of the pictures on which they appear are known to interfere with picture-naming, even when subjects are not asked to read the words. Instructions in the present study required subjects to either ignore the distractors, read them silently, pronounce them covertly, or say them aloud. The phonetically novel nonwords retarded picture-naming performance more than did real words when phonetic processing was explicitly required, but not during silent reading. In addition, covert pronunciation required more time than silent reading. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that access to the meaning of printed words does not require a phonetic recoding stage. Alternative explanations based on weaker forms of the phonetic recoding hypothesis were discussed.