Reading aloud: Dissociating the semantic pathway from the non-semantic pathway of the lexical route

According to dual-route models of reading,consistency effects in pseudoword reading areevidence for the activation of lexicalinformation. We investigated whether thislexical interference has a semantic or anon-semantic origin. In Experiment 1,participants named aloud a set of words andpseudowords. The consistency effect in readingpseudowords co-occurred with associativepriming effects in reading words but not withsemantic priming effects. In Experiment 2, onlywords were presented. Comparable effects ofboth associative priming and semantic primingin naming words were found. This patternprovides evidence for the existence of alexical non-semantic pathway in reading aloud.It also shows that this pathway is sensitive toassociative relations among words. Finally, itcalls into question the likelihood of afeedback mechanism from the semantic system tothe orthographic input lexicon.