English words have multi-letters that correspond to one phoneme (e.g., CHOP, WHIP, and THAT). The current competing hypotheses on the word recognition argue differently on whether these mufti-letters would form a phonemic unit in the fast-time scale priming task. Using the nonword priming task, three experiments showed that CLEY → crop (the condition of equal number of phonemes for the initial two-letters between the prime and the target) was easier in processing the target than CHEY → crop (the condition of different number of phonemes for the initial two-letters) in the fast-time scale priming, but not in the slow-time scale priming. These results indicate that the phonological information, the phonemic unit, arises early in word naming, supporting the phonological recoding hypothesis.

Key wards; ward naming, mufti-letter phonemic unit, phonological recoding hypothesis