Inhibition with orthographically similar low-frequency word targets preceded by high-frequency primes

The role of inhibition (increased latency) for lexical decisions on targets preceded by orthographically related high- and low-frequency primes was examined. There was more inhibition for targets preceded by orthographically related high-frequency primes, compared to the same targets preceded by orthographically unrelated primes. These results were interpreted as verification of a version of Colombo's (1986) inhibition hypothesis, modified to fit the current paradigm. According to the modified version of Colombo's hypothesis, the lexical memorial representation of a similarly spelled high-frequency prime competes with the target for recognition when the target is presented. In the current experiment, the lack of phonological inconsistency effects (e.g., TOUCH-COUCH vs. SPOKE-COUCH) was not interpreted to mean that phonological processing did not occur. The lack of phonological inconsistency effects was seen as the result of phonological processes being averaged across targets that were still influenced lexically by the memorial representations of similarly spelled high- and low-frequency primes.