JOURNAL OF MEMORY AND LANGUAGE 37, 463–480 (1997) ARTICLE NO. ML972535 Similarity Mapping in Spoken Word Recognition

Five phoneme monitoring experiments are reported that investigate the relationship between the degree of lexical activation (based on similarity of the input to a real word) and phoneme perception. Experiment 1 showed that phoneme monitoring detection times increased as similarity of the carrier to a real word decreased. Experiment 2 replicated these results with a set of two syllable stimuli. Experiment 4 extended the results of Experiments 1 and 2 to a new phoneme. Two additional control experiments (Experiments 3 and 5) were conducted with truncated stimuli where lexical contributions were removed. The results are discussed in terms of the architectural relationship between the acoustic-phonetic input, form-based lexical levels, and semantic levels of representation. q 1997 Academic Press It has long been observed that information tory signal and a lexical representation re-in the speech signal is variable. The earliest quires an unambiguous, canonical input. In spectrograms created at Haskins Laboratories general, this research reveals the remarkable in the 1950s attested to many of the seemingly tolerance of spoken word recognition pro-unpredictable features of the acoustic-pho- cesses to the presence of erroneous or ambigu-netic information that underlies speech per- ous signals