Accessing Spoken Words: The Importance of Word Onsets

Approaches to spoken word recognition differ in the importance they assign to word onsets during lexical access. This research contrasted the hypothesis that lexical access is strongly directional with the hypothesis that word onsets are less important than the overall goodness of fit between input and lexical form. A cross-modal priming technique was used to investigate the extent to which a rhyme prime (a prime that differs only in its first segment from the word that is semantically associated with the visual probe) is as effective a prime as the original word itself. Earlier research had shown that partial primes that matched from word onset were very effective cross-modal primes. The present results show that, irrespective of whether the rhyme prime was a real word or not, and irrespective of the amount of overlap between the rhyme prime and the original word, the rhymes are much less effective primes than the full word. In fact, no overall priming effect could be detected at all except under conditions in which the competitor environment was very sparse. This suggests that word onsets do have a special status in the lexical access of spoken words.