Effects of phonological similarity on priming in auditory lexical decision

Abstract

Two auditory lexical decision experiments were conducted to determine whether facilitation can be obtained when a prime and a target share word-initial phonological information. Subjects responded "word" or "nonword" to monosyllabic words and nonwords controlled for frequency. Each target was preceded by the presentation of either a word or nonword prime that was identical to the target or shared three, two, or one phonemes from the beginning. The results showed that lexical decision times decreased when the prime and target were identical for both word and nonword targets. However, no facilitation was observed when the prime and target shared three, two, or one initial phonemes. These results were found when the interstimulus interval between the prime and target was 500 msec or 50 msec. In a second experiment, no differences were found between primes and targets that shared three, one, or zero phonemes, although facilitation was observed for identical prime-target pairs. The results are compared to recent findings obtained using a perceptual identification paradigm. Taken together, the findings suggest several important differences in the way lexical decision and perceptual identification tasks tap into the information-processing system during auditory word recognition.Researchers concerned with issues in word recognition and lexical access have relied on the lexical decision paradigm to answer a number of fundamental questions about the representation of words in memory and the processes used to contact these representations in language processing. This paradigm requires subjects to determine as quickly as possible whether a stimulus item is a word or a nonword. Early research using lexical decision examined structural effects of visually presented lexical items on the speed of classifying these items as words or nonwords (Snodgrass & Jarvella, 1972;Stanners & Forbach, 1973;Stanners, Forbach, & Headley, 1971). In other research, the lexical decision task has been used to investigate the effects of frequency on classification time (Rubenstein, Garfield, & Millikan, 1970;Rubenstein, Lewis, & Rubenstein, 1971;Stanners, Jastrzembski, & Westbrook, 1975) and the status of morphologically related items in memory (Stanners, Neiser, Hernon, & Hall, 1979;Stanners, Neiser, & Painton, 1979;Taft & Forster, 1975, 1976.The basic design of the paradigm has also been extended to examine the priming effects of associated items on lexical decision times. Meyer and Schvaneveldt (1971) found that subjects were faster at classifying a letter string (e.g., DOCTOR) as a word if the preceding letter string was an associated word (e.g., NURSE) than if the preceding letter string was an unassociated word (e.g., BUTTER).The research reported here was supported by NIH Grant NS-12l79 to Indiana University in Bloomington. We would like to thank Paul A. Luce for assistance in recording the stimuli and for his comments on the manuscript. We also thank Joseph Sternberger for several suggestions. Requests for reprints should be sent to L. M. S...

Bias effects in facilitatory phonological priming

“…Subjects appear to learn that target words are likely to begin with the same segments as their primes; hence, they prepare the production of those segments and, thus, repeat the targets more rapidly (Goldinger, 1999;Hamburger & Slowiaczek, 1999). The effect is not observed in the lexical decision task (Radeau, Morais, & Dewier, 1989;Slowiaczek & Hamburger, 1992;Slowiaczek & Pisoni, 1986), except when materials are presented in noise and a relativelyhigh proportion of related trials is included (Goldinger, 1998b;Goldinger, Luce, Pisoni, & Marcario, 1992). Again, Goldinger et al (1992) explained the facilitation they observed in terms of bias: Expectations of shared initial segments between primes and targets could benefit performance on targets in noise even when no naming response is required.…”

“…This inhibition has been found both with shadowing (Goldinger, 1999;Hamburger & Slowiaczek, 1996;Radeau et al, 1989;Slowiaczek & Hamburger, 1992) and with lexical decision (Monsell & Hirsh, 1998;Radeau et al, 1989). In other lexical decision experiments, nonsignificant inhibitory trends have been observed (Praamstra, Meyer, & Levelt, 1994;Radeau et al, 1995;Slowiaczek & Pisoni, 1986).…”

Rhyme Priming in Aphasia: The Role of Phonology in Lexical Access

“…In an auditory lexical decision task, Jakimik, Cole & Rudnicky (1985) investigated the raIe of orthography in auditory lexical access. They found that In a later study, Slowiaczek, Nusbaum & Pisoni (1987) addressed the concern that the lack of priming in Slowiaczek & Pisoni (1986) There was no significant difference between unrelated pairs and pairs sharinq one phoneme, nor between pairs sharinq two and three phonemes, but identical pairs were significantly faster than pairs in aIl other conditions, and pairs sharing two phonemes were significantly faster than pairs sharing only one phoneme. A similar, but weaker, effect was found for non-word primes.…”

Perceptual processing of partially and fully assimilated words in French.

“…The processing of small arbitrary deviations in the speech signal has often been of interest in priming studies (cf. Connine, Blasko, & Titone, 1993;Radeau, Morais, & Segui, 1995;Slowiaczek & Pisoni, 1986). In the present research, we focus on a systematic, regular type of variation, namely regressive voice assimilation in French.…”