Word-monitoring tasks interact with levels of representation during speechcomprehension

Researchers frequently use data from monitoring tasks to argue that constra ints on meaning facilitate lower-level processes. An alternative hypothesis is that the processing level that a monitoring task requires interacts wit h discourse-level processing. Subjects monitored spoken sentences for a syn onym (semantic match), a nonsense word (phonological match), or a rhyme (ph onologically and semantically constrained matching). The critical targets a ppeared at the beginning of the final clause in two-clause sentences that b egan with if, which signals a semantic analysis at the discourse level, or with though, which maintains a surface representation. Synonym-monitoring t imes were faster for if than for though, nonsense word-monitoring times wer e faster than for if, and rhyme-monitoring times did not differ for if and though. The results show that conjunctions influence how listeners allocate attention to semantic versus phonological information, implying that liste ners form these kinds of information independently.