This study examines the nature of the phonological representations mediating spoken word recognition by means of phonetic priming in which primes and targets are phonetically similar but share no phonemes (GUESS - CAGE). We found an inhibitory priming effect of similar size for words and non-word primes in both a shadowing and a same-different judgement task. Together, these findings suggest a sublexical locus of the inhibitory phonetic priming effect and an intermediate phonemic level of representation between featural and lexical representations.