Spoken-word recognition: The access to embedded words

Two cross-modal priming experiments investigated whether the representation of either an initial- or a final-embedded word may be activated when the longer carrier word is auditorily presented. Visual targets were semantically related either to the embedded word or to the carrier word or they were unrelated to the primes. A priming effect was found for semantic associates of the carrier word in both experiments as well as for associates of the final-embedded word (Experiment 2). These results suggest that mapping speech onto lexical representations may imply lexical access attempts at several points during auditory processing of the speech signal. ª 1999 Academic Press Key Words: embedded words; word recognition; cross-modal semantic priming. Lexical access requires finding a phonologically legal match between acoustic–phonetic information and representations stored in the mental lexi-con (Gaskell & Marslen-Wilson, 1996). Although the speech signal is seg-mented during processing, very few reliable acoustic cues concerning the boundaries of real words are present during continuous speech. The question we addressed was whether lexical access is triggered only by the acoustic– phonetic onset of an auditory sequence, which implies an initial alignment This research was supported by a grant from the Fondation Fyssen (France) to F. Isel. We thank Angela Friederici and Juan Segui for their fruitful comments on a previous version of this article