Language and Cognitive Processes - Institut für Phonetik

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368 SPINELLI, SEGUI AND RADEAU
inuence of a prime word on the processing of a subsequently presented
target word that shares a number of phonemes with the prime.
Phonological priming has been used as a measure of activation and
competition between lexical candidates, and the effects obtained with this
paradigm have been used to infer aspects of the dynamics of spoken word
perception. A phonological priming effect suggests that the information
extracted from the prime can activate the representation of the target.
Therefore, we can determine the amount of information that is sufcient to
access the representations of lexical units by varying the amount of overlap
between prime and target pairs. Moreover, we can determine which
phonological components (like phonetic features, phonemes or syllables)
are involved in the process of contacting the lexicon, and assess the
consequences of a mismatch between the input and the form representations
in the processing of spoken words.
Previous studies have found that the conditions under which phonological
priming occurs are different for primes that overlap with the nal
parts of targets (e.g., mean-bean) and primes that overlap with the
beginning of targets (e.g., swan-swap) (see Goldinger, 1996; Radeau,
Morais, & Segui, 1995, for reviews). For nal overlap, facilitation is usually
reported for items sharing at least the rime (Emmorey, 1989; Radeau et al.,
1995; Slowiaczek, Nusbaum & Pisoni, 1987; Slowiaczek, Soltano &
McQueen, 1997), but only if both prime and target are presented in the
same modality (auditory). Null effects have sometimes been found
(Emmorey, 1989), but to the best of our knowledge, inhibitory effects
have not been reported. The fact that nal-overlap effects occur only
under unimodal (auditory-auditory) conditions, and not with crossmodal
presentation, has suggested that such effects do not involve the activation
of the lexical representation of the target (Dumay, Benrass, Barriol, Colin,
Radeau, & Besson, in press; Radeau, Segui & Morais, 1994). The
facilitation effect may be caused by the preactivation of sublexical units.
The fact that rime effects are insensitive to the relative frequency between
primes and targets supports the view that these effects do not take place at
a lexical level (Radeau et al., 1994, 1995).
The effects observed for beginning overlap are more complex. The
corresponding hypotheses are directly linked to temporal aspects of the
processing of spoken words. Two distinct effects have generally been
reported, which depend on the degree of phonological overlap. In
monosyllabic items, when only the rst phoneme is shared by primes
and targets, facilitatory effects have been reported (Goldinger, Luce,
Pisoni & Marcario, 1992; Slowiaczek & Hamburger, 1992). However, it has
been demonstrated that such effects can be attributed to strategies due to
either the experimental task when the presentation of degraded stimuli
might lead the participants to develop guessing strategies about the missing