Activation of Lexical and Semantic Representations without Intention along GPC-Sublexical and Orthographic-Lexical Reading Pathways in a Stroop Paradigm

Dual route models of reading suggest there are 2 pathways for reading words: an orthographic-lexical pathway, used to read familiar regular words and exception words, and a grapheme-to-phoneme-conversion-(GPC)-sublexical pathway, used to read unfamiliar regular words, pseudohomophones (PHs), and nonwords. It is unclear, however, whether PHs activate lexical and semantic representations without intention in the GPC-sublexical pathway to the same extent as words along the orthographic-lexical pathway. The present study explored this by introducing a novel condition, color pseudohomophone associates (CPHAs; e.g., "skigh"), in 3 experiments using the Stroop paradigm. Experiment 1 examined 4 types of stimuli: color words (CWs), color word associates (CWAs), color PHs (CPHs), and color PH associates (CPHAs), in a mixed list context. Significant Stroop effects were found for all 4 types of stimuli. To ensure the robustness of this effect, Experiment 2 was conducted using pure list contexts whereby participants received only word stimuli (e.g., CWs, CWAs) or only PH stimuli (e.g., CPHs, CPHAs). The results replicated those of Experiment 1, suggesting that CPHAs activate lexical and semantic representations without intention in the GPC-sublexical pathway. Experiment 3 added 2 novel conditions: color exception word associates (which can only be pronounced correctly using the orthographic-lexical pathway) to compare the effects obtained with color exception PH associates (which rely on the GPC-sublexical pathway for correct pronunciation). Stroop effects of similar magnitude were found for both types of stimuli, suggesting lexical and semantic representations are accessed without intention in either reading pathway to a similar degree. Implications for models of reading are discussed.