Probabilistic phonotactics and neighborhood activation in spoken word recognition

Recent work (Vitevitch & Luce, 1998) investigating the role of phonotactic information in spoken word recognition suggests the operation of two levels of representation, each having distinctly different consequences for proce ssing. The lexical level is marked by competitive effects associated with s imilarity neighborhood activation, whereas increased probabilities of segme nts and sequences of segments facilitate processing at the sublexical level . We investigated the two proposed levels in ix experiments using monosylla bic and specially constructed bisyllabic words and nonwords. The results of these studies provide further support for the hypothesis that the processi ng of spoken stimuli is a function of both facilitatory effects associated with increased phonotactic probabilities and competitive effects associated with the activation of similarity neighborhoods. We interpret these findin gs in the context of Grossberg, Boardman, and Cohen's (1997) adaptive reson ance theory of speech perception. (C) 1999 Academic Press.