Experimental evidence for phoneme‐level inhibition in spoken word recognition.

Abstract

The TRACE model of spoken word recognition [McClelland and Elman (1986)] contains phoneme‐level inhibition whereas the MERGE model [Norris et al. (2000)] does not. Little has been reported in the experimental literature to bear on the question of phoneme‐level inhibition, so the current study aims to fill this gap. An auditory lexical decision task was conducted, where participants were tested on English words preceded by isolated English sounds as primes. The relatedness of the prime sound to the final sound of the target word was manipulated. Phoneme‐level inhibition is demonstrated when participants respond more slowly in the Similar condition (e.g., /sh/ before “bus”) than in the Identical (e.g., /s/ before “bus”) and Unrelated (e.g., /m/ before “bus”) conditions. This task revealed that phoneme‐level inhibition was active at ISIs of 250 and 500 ms, but not 50 ms. A second lexical decision task indicated that inhibition begins after 125 ms and ends by 1000 ms. These results support models of word recognition that contain phoneme‐level inhibition. Finally, a single‐word shadowing task, in which participants repeat words primed by isolated English sounds as quickly as possible, is expected to replicate these findings and to extend them by adding speech error data.