Masked speech priming: no priming in dense neighbourhoods

Priming from a masked presentation of a written stimulus has been a productive technique in exploring visual word recognition. The current study explored a method for masked speech priming recently introduced in the literature, in which a compressed spoken prime is embedded in masking stimuli and presented immediately prior to a target. This procedure was examined by first investigating the degree to which spoken stimuli could be compressed without significant data loss. Second, using this compression level, repetition and form priming was measured for the target words with High versus Low phonological neighbourhoods. The results indicated that robust masked speech priming occurred only for word targets that had few phonological neighbours. Third, the audibility of the masked prime was assessed and results indicated that participants were unable to reliability determine prime lexical status.