2007/05/09

Spinelli, E. & Segui, J. (2001). Phonological priming in spoken word recognition with bisyllabic targets. Language and Cognitive Processes, 16(4), 367–392.

Presentation: Elisa
Summary: Renee

Previous studies have found that conditions under which phonological priming occurs are different for primes that overlap with the final parts of targets and primes that overlap with beginnings of targets. For final overlap, facilitation is reported for items sharing at least the rime, but only if both prime and target are presented in the same modality. For beginning overlap, two distinct effects have been reported. In monosyllabic items, facilitatory effects have been reported when only the first phoneme is shared by primes and targets. When two or more of the two first phonemes are shared, interference results rather than facilitation. This study aimed to investigate the nature of beginning and final overlap priming effects by carrying out four experiments. In Experiments 1a and 1b, auditorily presented monosyllabic word and pseudoword primes facilitated lexical decisions to auditorily presented bisyllabic words. Such facilitation was found to be significant for initial and final overlapping. Experiment 2 utilized a crossmodal method to examine the initial-overlap effect for monosyllabic word primes. The results showed no main effects for final-overlap condition and bisyllabic priming condition. Experiment 3 replicated the initial-overlap facilitation effect in a naming task. Significant effect was found only in initial-overlap condition.