Does a change in talker identity help listeners resolve lexical competition? Evidence from phonological priming

International audienceIn this study, we examined whether the lexical competition process embraced by most of models of spoken word recognition is sensitive to talker variation. We used a long lag priming experiment in which primes and targets sharing all except the last phoneme (e.g. /bagaR/ "fight" vs /bagaƷ/ "luggage") were presented in two separate blocks of stimuli. Our results showed clear inhibitory priming effects with slower response times when target words were preceded by a phonologically related prime in comparison to a control prime. However, we also observed that the magnitude of the inhibitory priming effect was of the same magnitude whether the prime competitor and the target word were spoken by different talkers or by the same talker. The results are discussed in reference to other studies showing talker specificity-effects and in which access to talker-specific representations was demonstrated