Experiments were conducted to investigate lexical and coarticulatory effects on phoneme processing in relation to the word recognition point. Real Japanese words and non-words all containing /k/ at various positions were presented to six subjects as naturally spoken or as synthesized by the concatenation of moras. Reaction times for /k/ in the words and for lexical decisions of the words were individually measured. A recognition point for each word was estimated from the time required to make a lexical decision. The results showed that the reaction times for /k/ in real words were the same for nonwords before the point preceding the word recognition point by about 300 ms. However, after this point, the reaction times for /k/ in real words was shorter than in nonwords. The results were the same for naturally-spoken words and concatenated words. Therefore, this facilitatory effect on phoneme processing is due to the use of lexical information and not coarticulatory information, and this lexical facilitation is effective even before a word is fully recognized.