Inhibitory phonetic priming: Where does the effect come from?

International audienceBoth phonological and phonetic priming studies reveal inhibitory effects that have been interpreted as resulting from lexical competition between the prime and target. We present a series of phonetic priming experiments that contrasted this lexical locus explanation with that of a pre-lexical locus by manipulating the lexical status of the prime and target and the task used. In the related condition of all experiments, spoken targets were preceded by spoken primes that are phonetically similar but share no phonemes with the target (/bak/-/dεt/). In Experiments 1 and 2, word and nonword primes produced an inhibitory effect of equal size in shadowing and same-different tasks, respectively. Experiments 3 and 4 showed robust inhibitory phonetic priming on both word and nonword targets in the shadowing task, but no effect at all in a lexical decision task. Together, these findings show that the inhibitory phonetic priming effect occurs independently of the lexical status of both the prime and the target, and only in tasks that do not necessarily require the activation of lexical representations. Our study thus argues in favor of a pre-lexical locus for this effect