Continuous and Discontinuous Access in Spoken Word-Recognition:

Theories of spoken word-recognition differ in the claims they make about continuous and discontinuous mapping of the speech input onto mental representations of lexical form. The research reported here contrasts the claims of a discontinuous, prefix-stripping model, and of a cohort-based continuous access model. In three experiments, using the gating, auditory lexical decision, and auditory naming tasks, we compared recognition-points for prefixed words (such as miscount) and their corresponding free stems (such as count). The results disconfirm the pretix-stripping model, showing that the recognition-point for a prefixed word was determined by the properties of the word as a complete, full form, and not, as a prefu-stripping model requires, by the properties of its stem. 6 1988 Academic PRSS, IIIC.