Looking for phoneme-level inhibition in spoken word recognition using auditory lexical decision.

Abstract

The TRACE model of spoken word recognition [McClelland & Elman (1986)] contains phoneme-level inhibition while the MERGE model [Norris et al. (2000)] does not include active competition between phonemes. Previous work found evidence for facilitation at the phoneme level and competition at the lexical level, but little research has been conducted looking for the existence of inhibition between phonemes. Using an auditory lexical decision task, the current study looks for phoneme-level inhibition by giving participants English target words preceded by isolated English sounds as primes. There are three conditions depending on how related the prime sound is to the final phoneme of the target word: identical (e.g., [s] before “gas”), similar (e.g., [s] before “cash”), and unrelated (e.g., [m] before gas). Facilitation, or faster average reaction times (RTs), is expected in the identical condition relative to the baseline unrelated condition. If facilitation is also found in the similar condition, the results will provide evidence against phoneme-level inhibition, supporting an approach with gradient activation of phonemes. However, if the average RT for the similar condition is greater than or equal to that of the unrelated condition, the results will support models of spoken word recognition containing phoneme-level inhibition.