Phonological priming effects were examined in an auditory single-word shadowing task. In 6 experiments, target items were preceded by auditorily or visually presented, phonologically similar, word or nonword primes. Results revealed facilitation in response time when a target was preceded by a word or nonword prime having the same initial phoneme when the prime was auditorily presented but not when it was visually presented. Second, modality-independent interference was observed when the phonological overlap between the prime and target increased from 1 to 3 phonemes for word primes but not for nonword primes. Taken together, these studies suggest that phonological information facilitates word recognition as a result of excitation at a prelexical level and increases response time as a result of competition at a lexical level. These processes are best characterized by connectionist models of word recognition.

The process of hypothesis testing entails both information selection (asking questions) and information use (drawing inferences from the answers to those questions). We demonstrate that although subjects may be sensitive to diagnosticity in choosing which questions to ask, they are insufficiently sensitive to the fact that different answers to the same question can have very different diagnosticities. This can lead subjects to overestimate or underestimate the information in the answers they receive. This phenomenon is demonstrated in two experiments using different kinds of inferences (category membership of individuals and composition of sampled populations). In combination with certain information-gathering tendencies, demonstrated in a third experiment, insensitivity to answer diagnosticity can contribute to a tendency toward preservation of the initial hypothesis. Results such as these illustrate the importance of viewing hypothesis-testing behavior as an interactive, multistage process that includes selecting questions, interpreting data, and drawing inferences.

Aphonological relationship between a prime and a target produces facilitation when one or two initial phonemes are shared (low-similarityfacilitation) but produces interference when more phonemes are shared (high-similarity interference; . Although low-similarity facilitation appears to be a strategic effect (Goldinger, Luce, Pisoni, & Marcario, 1992), this result cannot generalize to high-similarity interference because the two effects are dissociated . In the present study, strategic processing in high-similarityinterference was investigated. The phonological relatedness proportion (PRP) and the prime-target interstimulus interval (lSI) were varied in a shadowing experiment. Low-similarity facilitation was found only with a highPRPand long lSI, but high-similarityinterference was found regardless of PRP and lSI. These results suggest that strategies influence low-similarity facilitation, but high-similarityinterference reflects automatic processing.Several studies (e.g., Goldinger, Luce, Pisoni, & Marcario, 1992;Jakimik, Cole, & Rudnicky, 1985;Radeau, Morais, & Dewier, 1989; Siowiaczek & Hamburger, 1992) have examined the role ofphonology in auditory word recognition by using a priming paradigm (Meyer & Schvandeveldt, 1971) in which a target word is preceded by a prime that shares some of its initial phonemes. Two dissociable effects have been obtained in this area of research: low-similarity facilitation and high-similarity interference . Although low-similarity facilitation involves strategic processes (Goldinger et al., 1992), the influence of strategies in highsimilarity interference has not been investigated.Determining the role of strategic processes in phonological priming is critical for models of spoken word recognition that propose operations relying on the phonology and predict phonological priming under various circumstances. For instance, in cohort theory (Mars len-Wilson, 1987), word recognition begins by activating a cohort of possible lexical candidates whose initial phonemes match the incoming signal. As such, a phonologically related prime could preactivate a target and facilitate responses. Another theory, the neighborhood activation model (NAM; Luce, 1986), suggests that similar-sounding lexical entries compete during word recognition. That is, the probability ofrecognizing a word is a function of the number, word frequency, and phonetic similarity of the word's neighbors. Presenting a phonologically related prime effectively increases its frequency and, thus, increases the competition between it and the target. A connectionist model pro-