Kouider, S., & Dupoux, E., (2004). Partial awareness creates the 'illusion' of 
subliminal semantic priming, Psychological Science, 15(2):75-81.

This paper addresses the controversial topic of whether semantic activation
can occur for unconsciously perceived words. The lack of consensus on this
issue, we claim, arises from not taking into account the fact that
linguistic stimuli are represented across several processing levels
(features, letters, word form) which can independently reach or not reach
awareness. Using masked and briefly presented words, we construct
perceptual conditions in which participants are aware of some letters or
fragments, while remaining unaware of the whole word. We show in three
experiments using the Stroop Priming paradigm, that when the stimulus set
is reduced and participants are encouraged to guess the identity of the
prime, such partially perceived stimuli can nonetheless give rise to
"semantic" processing. We provide evidence that this effect is due to
illusory reconstruction of the incompletely perceived stimulus, followed by
usual semantic processing of the result. We conclude that previous reports
of unconscious Stroop Priming are in fact conscious effects, but applied to
a perceptual illusion.