title: Lexical inhibition and sublexical facilitation are surprisingly long lasting.
abstract: When a listener hears a word (beef), current theories of spoken word recognition posit the activation of both lexical (beef) and sublexical (/b/, /i/, /f/) representations. No lexical representation can be settled on for an unfamiliar utterance (peef). The authors examined the perception of nonwords (peef) as a function of words or nonwords heard 10-20 min earlier. In lexical decision, nonword recognition responses were delayed if a similar word had been heard earlier. In contrast, nonword processing was facilitated by the earlier presentation of a similar nonword (baff-paff). This pattern was observed for both word-initial (beef-peef), and word-final (job-jop) deviation. With the word-in-noise task, real word primes (beef) increased real word intrusions for the target nonword (peef), but only consonant-vowel (CV) or vowel-consonant (VC) intrusions were increased with similar pseudoword primes (baff-paff). The results across tasks and experiments support both a lexical neighborhood view of activation and sublexical representations based on chunks larger than individual phonemes (CV or VC sequences).
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Stony Brook University, Stoney Brook, NY 11794, USA.
authors.forename: Meghan
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Sumner
authors.forename: Arthur G
authors.initials: AG
authors.lastname: Samuel
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D007266:Inhibition, Psychological; D008037:Linguistics / Q000379:methods*; D011930:Reaction Time; D013067:Speech Perception; D013997:Time Factors; D014825:Vocabulary