Only the shadower knows: Comment on Hamburger and Slowiaczek (1996)

The phonological priming effect may reflect basic processes in spoken, word perception and has thus been a central topic of recent research. In this j ournal, Hamburger and Slowiaczek (1996) reported phonological priming data collected in a shadowing task. They replicated a prior study (Slowiaczek & Hamburger; 1992), but added new procedures to minimize bias. After observin g inhibitory priming in a "low-expectancy" condition, they concluded that f acilitatory priming reflects perceptual/response bias, but that inhibitory priming reflects automatic processes of lexical access. This commentary cri tiques Hamburger and Slowiaczek 's method and presents new data. that demon strate persistent biases in primed shadowing. I suggest that such biases re flect natural, context-sensitive listening strategies.