Effects of phonological similarity on priming in auditory lexical decision.

T$o auditory lexical decieion experiments were conducted to determine whether facilitation can be obtained when a prime and a target share word-initial phonological informatiol. Subjects responded .,word,,' or "nonword" to monoeyllabic words and nonwords controlled-for freqttengy. -n-"Jfri*S"t wae preceded by the presentation of either a word or nonword prime that wae identi""t to ittJt""get br shared ih.eeft*o, or one phonemes from the beginning. The-rgsults showed ihat lexical jecision times decreas€d when the prime and target w-ere identical for both word ."J"""*"ia targets. However, no facilitation was observed when the prime an! taS8e! shared ifr"*,-t*o, o, oo| initial phonemes. Theee reeults were found when the interetimulus int€nal il;; il pti-" and target was 500 msec gr 50 msec. In a second experiment, no differenceg wlre found b6t*re"r, primes"and targets that ehared three, one, or zero phonertles, althoug^h facili t.tio" "'"" oUserved ior identical prime-target pairs. The reeults-are compar-ed to recent frndings obtained using a perceptual identification para&gm. laken toge$gr,lhe findings syggest eeveral i-*rt""t diderences in the way lexical decieion and perceptual identification tasks tap into the i#ormation-processing syatem during auditory word recognition'