In a modified Stroop colour‐naming task, words which were semantically unassociated with the colour names, but which shared soundandspelling characteristics with those names, produced Stroop‐like facilitation and inhibition in groups of college students, 12‐ and 8‐year‐olds. When the stimulus words rhymed with the colour names but were orthographically dissimilar, effects were observed only for the 8‐year‐olds. The pattern of results suggests that phonological and orthographic characteristics of a word are available rapidly enough, in visual word recognition, to affect colour naming. For older subjects, the pattern of effects is consistent with lexical priming. For the younger subjects, the effects are attributed to the continued influence of grapheme‐phoneme translation rules in establishing production codes