In a recent article, Taft (1979b) argued that lexical access for visually presented words is based on an initial syllabic unit called the Basic Orthographic Syllable Structure, or BOSS, defined as that part of a word's first root morpheme that contains the first vowel and all orthographically permissible following consonants. The BOSS theory of lexical access rests on the two assumptions that (1) morphologically related words are accessed through an identical entry they share in the internal lexicon and (2) that words are accessed on the basis of an initial syllabic unit. Taft argued that lexical access based on a phonologically defined syllable such as the Vocalic Center Group, or VCG, would often result in morphologically related words being accessed through different lexical entries. The BOSS, in contrast to the VCG, preserves these morphological relationships by assigning a common BOSS to all affixed forms of a root. Thus, although FAS is the VCG of FASTER, both FASTER and FAST have FAST as their BOSS.