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Applying Bloch's law to visual word recognition research, both exposure duration of the prime and its luminance determine the prime's overall energy, and consequently determine the size of the priming effect. Nevertheless, experimenters using fast-priming paradigms traditionally focus only on the SOA between prime and target to reflect the absolute speed of cognitive processes under investigation. Some of the discrepancies in results regarding the time course of orthographic and phonological activation in word recognition research may be due to this factor. This hypothesis was examined by manipulating parametrically the luminance of the prime and its exposure duration, measuring their joint impact on masked repetition priming. The results show that small and nonsignificant priming effects can be more than tripled as a result of simply increasing luminance, when SOA is kept constant. Moreover, increased luminance may compensate for briefer exposure duration and vice versa. The model suggests that prelexical phonological computation is, in most cases, relatively slow, lagging behind orthographic processing. Thus, the grapheme-phoneme-conversion route in the DRC computational model operates only after several cycles of the simulation have taken place, and each letter is made available for the computation process only after a constant number of cycles have elapsed. Given that prelexical computation is serial, the model is structured so that the lexical activation of the final phonemes will usually precede their prelexical activation. This architecture was probably implemented to avoid high rates of regularization on exception words. It poses, however, interesting constraints on the ability of the model to account for lexical access occurring via fast prelexical phonological encoding (see Rastle & Brysbaert, 2006, for a detailed discussion). In contrast, to dual-route models, the strong phonological theory (e.g., Frost, 1995Frost, , 1998 Lukatela & Turvey, 1994a,b;Van Orden, Pennington & Stone, 1990) regards prelexical phonological computation as the initial cognitive operation launched in the reading process, and considers it to be very fast. Thus, findings regarding the speed of phonological computation are expected to provide distinguishing evidence between the two Correspondence should be addressed to Ram Frost,