Segmental and suprasegmental mismatch in lexical access

Four cross-modal priming experiments in Spanish addressed the role of supra segmental and segmental information in the activation of spoken words. List eners heard neutral sentences ending with word fragments (e.g., princi-) an d made lexical decisions on letter strings presented at fragment offset. Re sponses were compared for fragment primes that fully matched the spoken for m of the initial portion of target words, versus primes that mismatched in a single element (stress pattern; one vowel; one consonant), versus control primes. Fully matching primes always facilitated lexical decision response s, in comparison to the control condition, while mismatching primes always produced inhibition. The respective strength of the contribution of stress, vowel, and consonant (one feature mismatch or more) information did not di ffer statistically. The results support a model of spoken-word recognition involving automatic activation of word forms and competition between activa ted words, in which the activation process is sensitive to all acoustic inf ormation relevant to the language's phonology. (C) 2001 Academic Press.