Visual Word Recognition in Serbo-croatian Is Necessarily Phonological

In a naming task conducted with bi-alphabetic readers of Serbo-Croatian. it was shown that letter strings that can be assigned both a Roman and a Cyrillic alphabet reading incur longer latencies than the unique alphabet transcription of the same word. and that the magnitude of the difference depended on the number of ambiguous characters in the ambiguous letter string. While this wi thin-word phonological ambiguity effect obtained for both wprds and pseudowords. it was more consistent with words. The same pattern of results occurred in a lexical decision task. and the correlation between latencies (for words and pseudowords) in the two tasks was significant. It was concluded that both lexical decision and naming in Serbo-Croatian necessarily involve a phonological strategy.