Vertical similarity in spoken word recognition: multiple lexical activation, individual differences, and the role of sentence context.
Four experiments investigated acoustic-phonetic similarity in the mapping process between the speech signal and lexical representations (vertical similarity). Auditory stimuli were used where ambiguous initial phonemes rendered a phoneme sequence lexically ambiguous (perceptual-lexical ambiguities). A cross-modal priming paradigm (Experiments 1, 2, and 3) showed facilitation for targets related to both interpretations of the ambiguities, indicating multiple activation. Experiment 4 investigated individual differences and the role of sentence context in vertical similarity mapping. The results support a model where spoken word recognition proceeds via goodness-of-fit mapping between speech and lexical representations that is not influenced by sentence context.
Connine
C M
CM
State University of New York, Department of Psychology, Binghamton 13901.
Blasko
D G
DG
Wang
J
J
D006801:Humans; D010700:Phonetics; D011930:Reaction Time; D013061:Speech Acoustics; D013067:Speech Perception; D014825:Vocabulary