Language and Cognitive Processes - Institut für Phonetik

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378 SPINELLI, SEGUI AND RADEAU
Discussion
For partial priming, facilitation was found only for prime words
overlapping with targets in the initial syllable; no priming was observed
for primes overlapping in the second syllable. The fact that the initial
facilitation effect remains when the target is visually presented supports
the idea that the lexical representation of the target is activated during the
processing of the prime. Indeed, if we suppose that the 50 ms interstimulus-interval
between the end of the prime and the presentation of the
target is not long enough to be processed as mismatching information, the
target occurs while it is still activated by the prime. This preactivation of
the lexical representation of the target would then be responsible for the
initial-overlap facilitation effect.
For nal overlap, the lack of facilitation is compatible with previous
results in the literature, as nal phonological overlap effects have never
been reported with a crossmodal paradigm. These results thus argue in
favour of the idea that the processes responsible for the nal overlap
facilitation involve only the activation of sublexical units. The nal
facilitation obtained in auditory-auditory priming could be due to the fact
that primes and targets share a number of sublexical units. This means that
although hearing tige would facilitate the subsequent processing of vertige,
it would not activate its lexical representation.
In the condition of bisyllabic priming, the beginning overlap condition
did not give rise to any facilitation of target processing. Hence, depending
on the nature of the prime (monosyllabic as in ‘‘ver-vertige’’ or bisyllabic
as in ‘‘verger-vertige’’), we observed either facilitation or no effect,
respectively. Moreover, although not signicant, the results with bisyllabic
primes suggest inhibition rather than facilitation. According to our
interpretation, when the prime was a monosyllabic word, the target
received bottom up activation from the prime and remained activated
because there was no mismatching information in the acoustic realisation
of the prime. Thus, the representation of the preactivated target was not
deactivated when the target was presented. On the contrary, when the
prime was a bisyllabic word, it induced deactivation of the target. In the
case of ‘‘verger-VERTIGE’’, hearing the beginning of the prime would
send bottom up activation to a cohort of candidates beginning by ‘‘ver’’,
but during the processing of ‘‘g’’ in ‘‘verger’’, the word ‘‘vertige’’ would
start to be deactivated or inhibited. Thus, at the end of the prime ‘‘verger’’,
the word ‘‘vertige’’ would no longer be activated when subsequently
presented as a target.
Our results are compatible with those reported by Zwitserlood (1989)
who found that the two semantically related targets ‘‘geld’’ (money in
Dutch) and ‘‘boot’’ (ship) were facilitated when presented during the /t/ of