Lexical inhibition effects in time-compressed speech

A recent study claimed that inhibitory processes in spoken language processing are relatively slow and may be strongly reduced in listening conditions that require extra processing resources. Time compression of a sentence context did not reduce facilitation of a congruent word target, but inhibition of word targets that were incongruent with the preceding sentence context was strongly reduced. The central question in this paper is whether lexical competition/inhibition effects due to word-initial overlap between primes and targets will be similarly affected by moderate time compression. The alternative option is that inhibition is not affected by time compression because lexical inhibition processes are qualitatively different from sentence-priming expectancybased processes. The results of a prime-target experiment showed evidence for the latter option. Inhibition due to lateral competition seems to be a fast process that is not affected by increased processing load.