Abstractness, allomorphy, and lexical architecture

Two intra-modal immediate repetition priming experiments ask whether speech inputs can link directly to abstract underlying representations, or whethe r access is mediated via intervening "access representations" of each word' s surface phonetic form. Experiment 1 showed that auditory-auditory priming between morphologically related derived/stem pairs (such as excitement/exc ite) was not affected by allomorphic variation in the phonetic form of the stem in prime and target (as in sanity/sane). Experiment 2 showed that inte rference effects between suffixed primes and targets sharing the same stem (as in excitement/excitable) were also unaffected by stem variation (as in sanity/sanely). These results, which cannot be attributed to either semanti c or phonological factors, are problematic for mediated access theories and point to direct access from speech to abstract representations at the leve l of the lexical entry.