Phonetic priming in spoken word recognition: Task comparisons

Abstract

In an effort to reveal the nature of the representation underlying spoken word recognition, a basic priming paradigm has been used across a series of different tasks. The paradigm involves presenting subjects with natural CVC prime-target pairs in various degrees of phonetic overlap, and asking the subjects to respond to the target as fast as possible in a task-specific manner. Previous reports on the use of this paradigm described the results from a naming task [Gagnon and Sawusch, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 85, S125 (1989)] and a phoneme monitoring task [Gagnon and Sawusch, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 86, S99 (1989)]. The pattern of results obtained in the naming task reflected a position-specific phonetic representation, while the phoneme monitoring task yielded results supportive of an allophonic representation. The methodology has been extended to a lexical decision task in which subjects determine whether the target item is a word or nonword. A comparison of the results obtained from the lexical decision task to those obtained from the naming and phoneme monitoring tasks will be made, and conclusions regarding the appropriateness of these tasks for investigating the representation used in spoken word recognition will be offered. [Work supported by NIDCD Grant DC00219 to SUNY at Buffalo.]