*Address correspondence to:

People are severely limited in the rate they can identify and report visual events presented in rapid succession. This has been the focus of research on the attentional blink (AB) which is a deficit in the ability to report a second target appearing within half a second of a correctly identified first target (T1). The AB may reflect limitations for consolidating visual stimuli into working memory and awareness. We tested this by examining a variable, word length, that is known to affect verbal working memory. Experiment 1 showed that the AB was modulated by the phonological length of T1, operationally defined as number of syllables, even when visual length was held constant. Phonologically longer pseudoword targets triggered larger blink deficits. Experiment 2 also demonstrated the word length effect on the AB using real world stimuli, anagrams, that controlled for low-level visual differences between phonological length conditions. Our data supports proposals that the AB reflects a difficulty in consolidating information into working memory, and phonological word length represents one factor that influences the efficacy of this process for word stimuli. Phonological Attentional Blink