Recent models of visual word recognition assume that sublexical orthographic-phonological information is organized according to an onset-nucleus-coda scheme (Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, & Patterson, 1996; Jacobs, Rey, Ziegler, & Grainger, 1998, but see Coltheart, Curtis, Atkins & Haller, 1993 for an alternative view). In this study we test the hypothesis that onset- nucleus-coda subsyllabic components are sublexical reading units mediating visual word recognition. We present a sublexical measure that is based on cumulated frequency of these phonology-dependent, orthographic subsyllabic components: Subcomponent Frequency (SCF). In a lexical decision task we found that SCF facilitates visual word recognition for low-frequency words, but not for high-frequency words. For nonwords, we observed that those with high-SCF are harder to distinguish from words than nonwords with low-SCF. In contrast, a standard and purely orthographic measure of sublexical structure, Bigram Frequency, did not produce an effect in our study, when SCF was controlled. Thus, we conclude that SCF is a promising first step towards indexing phonographic sublexical processing.