A discrete color naming paradigm was used in two experiments examining activation along orthographic and phonological dimensions in visual and auditory word recognition. Subjects were 80 college students who were presented with a prime word, either auditorally or visually, followed 200 milliseconds later by a target word printed in a color. The orthographic and phonological similarity of prime-target pairs varied. Color naming latencies were longer when the prime and target words were orthographically or phonologically similar than when they were unrelated. The results were the same for both prime presentation modes. The findings suggested that word recognition entails activation of multiple codes and priming of orthographically and phonologically similar words. (Author/RL)