Phonological codes are used to access the lexicon during silent reading

Readers' eye movements were monitored as they read sentences containing 1 member of a homophonic heterograph pair (e.g., soul-sole) or an unambiguous frequency- and length-matched control word. Prior context was either semantically neutral (Experiment 1) or semantically biasing (Experiment 2). The meaning dominance and word frequency of the heterographic targets were manipulated such that half were balanced and half were biased, and half were high frequency and half were low frequency. The processing pattern for both high- and low-frequency heterographs mirrored the pattern commonly observed for lexically ambiguous words. These findings are consistent with models of word recognition in which phonological codes activate word meaning for both high- and low-frequency words.