Phonological priming in auditory word recognition: When both controlled and automatic processes are responsible for the effects.

International audienceThe phonological priming paradigm provides an interesting methodological tool for studying various components of the speech recognition process. However, concerns about response biases distorting the effects have been repeatedly voiced. This article reviews the main studies on priming and aims to distinguish effects under automatic processes from those under some level of strategic control. Both controlled and automatic processes appear to be responsible for the effects observed in phonological priming experiments. Nonetheless, with careful procedures, it is possible to separate them. Priming methodologies such as semantic priming and form priming have been used extensively to investigate the structural and processing characteristics of words in memory. In such a paradigm, two words (prime and target) are presented in close temporal succession, and participants perform a task (e.g., lexical decision or shadowing) on the second word. The relationship between the prime and the target is manipulated along semantic or form-based (orthographic–phonological) dimensions. Of interest is what effect the prime has on the processing of the target. In the field of spoken word recognition, one type of form priming that has been of interest is phonological priming. As I describe in detail below, effects differ depending on the location of the overlapping segments and on the extent to which primes and targets overlap. For primes that overlap with the final phonemes of targets (e.g., MEAN–BEAN), facilitation of processing has systematically been found (Dumay et al