We report three masked associative priming experiments with the lexical decision task that explore whether the initial activation flow of a visually presented word activates the semantic representations of that word's orthographic/phonological neighbours. The predictions of cascades and serial/modular models of lexical processing differ widely in this respect. Using a masked priming paradigm (stimulus onset asynchrony, SOA = 50 ms), words preceded by ortho-phonologically mediated associated “neighbours” (oveja–MIEL, the Spanish for sheep–HONEY; note that oveja is a phonological neighbour of abeja, the Spanish for bee) were recognized more rapidly than words preceded by an unrelated word prime (Experiments 1 and 3). Furthermore, the magnitude of the ortho-phonologically mediated priming effect (oveja–MIEL) was similar to the magnitude of the associative priming effect (abeja–MIEL). With visible primes and a 250-ms SOA, only the directly associated words showed a priming effect (Experiment 2). These findings pose some problems for a modular account and are more easily interpreted in terms of cascaded models.
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