The Phi-square statistic proved an effective measure for assessing lexical competition and explained significant variance in visual spoken word recognition beyond that accounted for by traditional metrics. Because these values include the influence of a large subset of the lexicon (rather than only perceptually similar words), it suggests that even perceptually distant words may receive some activation, and therefore provide competition, during spoken word recognition. This work supports and extends earlier research (Auer, 2002; Mattys et al., 2002) that proposed a common recognition system underlying auditory and visual spoken word recognition and provides support for the use of the Phi-square statistic for quantifying lexical competition.