Priming the phonemic restoration illusion

Abstract

When a portion of a spoken word is replaced by noise, listeners tend to perceptually restore the missing information. Recently, it has been shown that this phonemic restoration illusion is facilitated by the presentation of an intact version of a word prior to the same word with noise replacement [A. G. Samuel, J. Exptl. Psychol.: General 110, 474–494 (1981)]. The effects of this intact word prime on phonemic restoration may be attributed to either or both of two perceptual processes. One possible locus of this priming effect is phonemic encoding. The second possibility is the top‐down flow of information produced by lexical access. To dissociate the potential effects of phonological and lexical priming, the relationship between prime and test word was systematically varied. Subjects participated in: (1) a no prime condition, (2) a dissimilar word prime condition, (3) an identical word prime condition, and (4) a pseudoword prime condition in which the primes were phonologically matched to the test words. The interval between prime and test word was also varied. Signal‐detection analyses of the data provided separate measures of changes in discriminability and response bias across these conditions. The results have implications for theories of word recognition, lexical access, and the interaction of knowledge sources in spoken language understanding. [Work supported by grants from NIMH and NINCDS.]