Phonetic priming, neighborhood activation, and PARSYN

Perceptual identification of spoken words in noise is less accurate when th e target words are preceded by spoken phonetically related primes (Goldinge r, Luce, & Pisoni, 1989). The present investigation replicated and extended this finding. Subjects shadowed target words presented in the clear that w ere preceded by phonetically related or unrelated primes. In addition, prim es were either higher or lower in frequency than the target words. Shadowin g latencies were significantly longer for target words preceded by phonetic ally related primes, but only when the prime-target interstimulus interval was short (50 vs. 500 msec). These results demonstrate that phonetic primin g does not depend on target degradation and that it affects processing time . We further demonstrated that PARSYN-a connectionist instantiation of the neighborhood activation model-accurately simulates the observed pattern of priming.