Bowers, Davis, and Hanley (Bowers, J. S., Davis, C. J., & Hanley, D. A. (2005). "Interfering neighbours: The impact of novel word learning on the identification of visually similar words." "Cognition," 97(3), B45-B54) reported that if participants were trained to type nonwords such as "banara", subsequent semantic categorization responses to similar words such as "banana" were delayed. This was taken as direct experimental support for a process of lexical competition during word recognition. This interpretation assumes that "banara" has been lexicalized, which predicts that masked form priming for items such as "banara"-"banana" should be reduced or eliminated. An experiment is reported showing that the trained novel words produced the same amount of priming as untrained nonwords on both the first and the second day of training, suggesting that the interference observed by Bowers et al was not due to word-on-word competition. (Contains 2 tables.)