Rime Priming Effects in Spoken Word Recognition

Abstract

Abstract: In this study, we re-examined the facilitation that occurs when auditorily presented monosyllabic primes and targets share their final phonemes, and in particular the rime (e.g., /vɔʀd/–/kɔʀd/). More specifically, we asked whether this rime facilitation effect is also observed when the two last consonants of the rime are transposed (e.g., /vɔʀd/–/kɔʀd/). In comparison to a control condition in which the primes and the targets were unrelated (e.g., /pylt/–/kɔʀd/), we found significant priming effects in both the rime (/vɔʀd/–/kɔʀd/) and the transposed-phoneme “rime” /vɔdʀ/–/kɔʀd/ conditions. We also observed a significantly greater priming effect in the former condition than in the latter condition. We use the theoretical framework of the TISK model ( Hannagan et al., 2013 ) to propose a novel account of final overlap phonological priming in terms of activation of both position-independent phoneme representations and bi-phone representations.