Can Theories of Word Recognition Remain Stubbornly Nonphonological?*

The issue of how readers get from the printed word to its lexical representation is a hotly contested one (see Carr & Pollatsek, 1985; Humphreys & Evett, 1985; Van Orden, Pennington, & Stone, 1990, for reviews). Candidate routes are the visual and the phonological. In the visual route, lexical entries are said to be accessed directly on the basis of orthographic properties. The phonological route requires that lexical access be mediated by the recoding of graphemes into their corresponding phonemes. Considerable experimental data have been offered in support of both types of routes. The bulk of research on word identification using English language materials has been taken to implicate the dominance of a visual access route with, perhaps, an optional but not preferred phonological route (e.g., Coltheart, Besner, Jonasson, & Davelaar, 1979; Humphreys & Evett, 1985). Data on word identification using Serbo-Croatian language materials point unequivocally to a nonoptional phonological access route (e.g., Lukatela & Turvey, 1990a, b; LUkatela, Carello, & Turvey, 1990). We assume that the basic mechanism of written language processing is the same for all languages. Different data patterns among languages, therefore, are to be taken as evidence of how that mechanism can be fine-tuned by the structure of a particular language. We will use some differences and similarities between Serbo-Croatian, English, and Hebrew to elucidate possible features of a