Language and Cognitive Processes - Institut für Phonetik

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PHONOLOGICAL PRIMING 375
and vate, leading to shorter response times for vertige and cravate, whose
representations have been preactivated. A third possibility is that initial
and nal facilitation effects reect different levels of processing.
In order to examine this point, primes and targets were presented in
different modalities in the following experiment. If the preactivation of
sublexical units is the only origin of the facilitation observed for initial and
nal overlap, no facilitation should be found using a crossmodal paradigm,
because the sublexical units activated by the prime could not be reused to
speed up the processing of the target in this case. On the contrary, if initial
and nal facilitations reect the activation of the lexical representation of
the target, they should be modality independent and should remain when
tested in different modalities.
As the data reviewed in the introduction suggest, beginning overlap
effects reect lexical competition. Therefore we hypothesise that in the
partial priming condition of Experiments 1a and 1b, with the rst syllable
of the target presented as prime, the facilitation reects the activation of
the lexical representation of the target, and not only the use of
preactivated sublexical units. If this hypothesis is true, we predict that
the initial overlap effect will be observed with a crossmodal paradigm. On
the contrary, the nal facilitation effect has been interpreted as the result
of activation of sublexical units by the prime. Therefore, we predict that
the effect will disappear in the crossmodal paradigm.
To further ascertain the nature of the beginning overlap effect, we
compared the partial priming condition with a condition of bisyllabic
priming in which bisyllabic words sharing the rst syllable with the target
served as primes (verger-VERTIGE, [orchard-VERTIGO]. This bisyllabic
priming condition parallels the beginning overlap that is generally used in
phonological priming experiments with monosyllables since the activation
of a given candidate is measured after the processing of mismatching
information. 3
Note nally that we aimed to compare bisyllabic word primes and
monosyllabic primes. Because the lexicality of the prime did not inuence
our previous effects, only word primes were used in the following
experiments.
Method
EXPERIMENT 2
Participants. Sixty students participated in this experiment for course
credit. All participants were native speakers of French, had normal or
3 Final overlap bisyllabic primes were used in the crossmodal experiment to parallel the
experimental conditions of the partial priming. A null effect is predicted in this condition for
the same reason as for the nal partial priming.