Authors:

MARSLEN-WILSON, W.D. & Zhou, X.

Reference:

Year of publication:

1999

CBU number:

3904

Abstract:

Two intra-modal immediate repetition priming experiments ask whether speech inputs can link directly to abstract underlying representation, or whether access is mediated via intervening ìaccess representationsî of each wordís surface phonetic form. Experiment 1 showed that auditory-auditory priming between morphologically related derived/stem pairs (such as excitement/excite) was not affected by allomorphic variation in the phonetic form of the stem in prime and target (as in sanity/sane). Experiment 2 showed that interference effects between suffixed primes and targets sharing the same stem (as in excitement/excitable) were also unaffected by stem variation (as in sanity/sanely). These results, which cannot be attributed to either semantic or phonological factors, are problematic for mediated access theories and point to direct access from speech to abstract representations at the level of the lexical entry.