Is phonological encoding in naming influenced by literacy?

We examined phonological priming in illiterate adults, using a cross-modal picture-word interference task. Participants named pictures while hearing distractor words at different Stimulus Onset Asynchronies (SOAs). Ex-illiterates and university students were also tested. We specifically assessed the ability of the three populations to use fine-grained, phonemic units in phonological encoding of spoken words. In the phoneme-related condition, auditory words shared only the first phoneme with the target name. All participants named pictures faster with phoneme-related word distractors than with unrelated word distractors. The results thus show that phonemic representations intervene in phonological output processes independently of literacy. However, the phonemic priming effect was observed at a later SOA in illiterates compared to both ex-illiterates and university students. This may be attributed to differences in speed of picture identification.