Phonetic priming effects in auditory word recognition

The vowel phonetic priming experiment and the fricative phonetic priming experiment
 showed that priming based on phonetic overlap can be observed in an auditory lexical
decision task. The phonetic priming paradigm provides a tool to investigate how lower-level
acoustic-phonetic information is used to access lexical representations in spoken
word recognition.

The present results suggest that phonetic features rather than segments are active in lexical access. In future experiments, we hope to test this claim in more detail by systematically varying the acoustic-phonetic overlap between prime and target segments.

Such manipulations will enable us to investigate the role of fine-grained acoustic-phonetic information (for example, coarticulatory cues or allophonic information) in lexical access processes.