Lexical activation produces potent phonemic percepts

Theorists disagree about whether auditory word recognition is a fully bottom-up, autonomous process, or whether there is top-down processing within a more interactive architecture. The current study provides evidence for top-down lexical to phonemic activation. In several experiments, listeners labeled members of a /bI/-/dI/ test series, before and after listening to repeated presentations of various adapting sounds. Real English words (containing either a /b/ or a /d/) produced reliable adaptation shifts in labeling of the /bI/-/dI/ syllables. Critically, so did words in which the /b/ or /d/ was perceptually restored (when noise replaced the /b/ or /d/). Several control conditions demonstrated that no adaptation occurred when no phonemic restoration occurred. Similarly, no independent role in adaptation was found for lexical representations themselves. Thus, the results indicate that lexical activation can cause the perceptual process to synthesize a highly functional phonemic code. This result provides strong evidence for interactive models of word recognition.