Phonological priming in auditory word recognition.

Abstract

Cohort theory, developed by Marslen-Wilson and Welsh (1978), proposes that a "cohort" of all the words beginning with a particular sound sequence will be activated during the initial stage of the word recognition process. We used a priming technique to test specific predictions regarding cohort activation in three experiments. In each experiment, subjects identified target words embedded in noise at different signal-to-noise ratios. The target words were either presented in isolation or preceded by a prime item that shared phonological information with the target. In Experiment 1, primes and targets were English words that shared zero, one, two, three, or all phonemes from the beginning of the word. In Experiment 2, nonword primes preceded word targets and shared initial phonemes. In Experiment 3, word primes and word targets shared phonemes from the end of a word. Evidence of reliable phonological priming was observed in all three experiments. The results of the first two experiments support the assumption of activation of lexical candidates based on word-initial information, as proposed in cohort theory. However, the results of the third experiment, which showed increased probability of correctly identifying targets that shared phonemes from the end of words, did not support the predictions derived from the theory. The findings are discussed in terms of current models of auditory word recognition and recent approaches to spoken-language understanding.The perception and comprehension of spoken language involves a complex interaction among several different sources of linguistic information. To comprehend a sentence, a listener must analyze the phonetic, lexical, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information encoded in the speech waveform. Word perception is clearly a critical part of the comprehension process because words provide the interface between the perceptual processing of stimulus information and the conceptual interpretation of an utterance. In principle, it is possible to distinguish two functionally different processes that subserve word perception: word recognition and lexical access. Although there are no standard or widely agreed-upon definitions for these terms, we can define word recognition as the pattern recognition process that allows a listener to identify a spoken or printed stimulus as a word and lexical access as the process that mediates access to abstract knowledge (e.g., syntactic, semantic, pragmatic information) about a lexical entry (see Pisoni & Luce, in press). Note that making this theoretical distinction does not require that these processes operate as autonomous modules (cf. Fodor, 1983;Forster, 1978); rather it serves only to partition word perception into separate cognitive operations that are theoretically quite different.Over the last few years, there has been an increased interest in the processes that mediate perception of spoken words (Cole, 1980;Cole & Rudnicky, 1983) and three general findings have emerged from this work (see Cole & Jakimik, 1980;Foss & Blank...

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.…”

“…These two types of pairs represent the difference between non-rhyming and rhyming pairs. Slowiaczek et al (1987) Phonological priming between words suggests that a phonological lexicon similar to the semantic lexicon may exist; however, results demonstrating priming with non-words bring up the possibility that phonological priming takes place at a sublexical level. Wherever it exerts its effect, one must also consider how phonological information interacts with semantic information.…”

“…Identity priming, on the In principle, the autonomous search model (Forster, 1976) could account for differences between word and non-word In summary, the present study strongly supports the existence of rhyme relationships at both lexical and sublexical levels in normal subjects. Although word-initial phonological information has been found to play a role in auditory word recognition (Salasoo , Pisoni, 1985;MarslenWilson & Zwitserlood, 1989), word endings have also been implicated (Slowiaczek et al, 1987;Milberg et al, 1988a;Burton, in press Jakimik et al, 1985) or shared morphological segments (Emmorey, 1989). Further research is necessary to determine which structural relationships are Most relevant during on-going normal language processing_ Additional research is also needed to clarify the inconsistent findings of mediated priming experiments throughout the literature with normal subjects (e.g.…”

How word onsets drive lexical access and segmentation: evidence from acoustics, phonology and processing

“…Identity priming was found in a task involving the offline identification of citation-form word tokens presented in noise when prime and probe items had different initial phonemes (e.g. HAND primes SAND) [20]. Similarly, derived citation form primes facilitate lexical decision for semantically related visual probe stimuli [21], and the same result has been found using an intramodal auditory priming paradigm with derived primes, and primes with phonetically ambiguous onset phonemes [22].…”

“…There is ample evidence that lexical hypotheses play a role in word perception. Lexical effects have been found in the perception of phonetically ambiguous, incomplete or distorted words in tasks including phoneme categorization [17], phoneme monitoring [18], phoneme restoration [16], shadowing [19], mispronunciation monitoring [19], and the identification of words in noise [20].…”