Single-route theories that argue that access to meaning is always mediated by phonology are consistent with process theories of automaticity. Dual-route theories, suggesting that reading skill results in direct access, are consistent with the notion of automaticity as memory retrieval. If word reading reflects memory retrieval, the Stroop effect should be absent in the absence of cues normally serving for retrieval. The Stroop effect was obtained in Hebrew-English bilinguals for cross-script homophones, which have meaning as color names in one language but are written in a script of the other language. The Stroop effect in cross-script homophones was independent of response mode and was insensitive to color-related proportion, supporting the assumption of different routes being involved in access to meaning of regular words and cross-script homophones. Implications for automaticity, theories of word reading, and knowledge representation by bilinguals are discussed.Reading is a cognitive skill that most humans acquire early and use extensively during their lives. The term word reading, as used by us, refers to mapping from strings of graphemes (i.e., written words) to meaning, when such strings are presented in isolation. Because extensive practice leads to automatic processing (Logan, 1988a), most investigators agree that word reading, at least in skilled readers, is an automatic process. In this article we analyze word reading from the viewpoint of approaches to automaticity.Our study has implications for theories of automaticity on the one hand and for theories of word reading on the other. In addition, because of the special kinds of stimuli we used, our findings are also relevant to the issue of knowledge representation by bilinguals. Approaches to AutomaticityAutomatic processing in general, and skilled word reading in particular, may be performed in two modes. Jacoby, Levy, and

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