Lexical effects on compensation for coarticulation: the ghost of Christmash past

A long running debate about the architecture of the spoken-word recognition system has centered on the locus of lexical effects on phonemic processing: does lexical knowledge influence phoneme perception through feedback, or post-perceptually in a purely feedforward system? Elman and McClelland (1988) reported that lexically-restored ambiguous phonemes influenced the perception of the following phoneme, supporting models with feedback from lexical to phonemic representations. Subsequently, several authors have argued that these results can be fully accounted for by diphone transitional probabilities in a feedforward system (Cairns et al., 1995; Pitt and McQueen, 1998). We report results strongly favoring the original Elman and McClelland explanation: lexical effects were present even when transitional probability biases were opposite to those of lexical biases.