Delayed commitment in spoken word recognition: evidence from cross-modal priming

Area of Science:

• Psycholinguistics
• Cognitive Psychology
• Speech Perception

Background:

• Investigating how the human brain processes spoken language and recognizes words is crucial for understanding cognitive architecture.
• The role of morphemes, the smallest meaningful units in language, in word recognition is a key area of inquiry.

Purpose of the Study:

• To determine if semantic representations of word-final morphemes in multisyllabic words are independently activated in memory.
• To test if auditory primes of multisyllabic words facilitate lexical decision times to visual targets, even after the word's recognition point.

Main Methods:

• Employed the cross-modal priming paradigm.
• Utilized a gating task to confirm word identification before offset.
• Compared lexical decision times for monosyllabic primes versus multisyllabic primes paired with visual targets.

Main Results:

• Significant priming effects were observed for both monosyllabic (/lak/-KEY) and multisyllabic (/hemlak/-KEY) conditions.
• Auditory primes facilitated lexical decision times to visual targets, supporting independent morpheme activation.

Conclusions:

• The findings suggest that speech recognition processes initiate lexical access at strong syllables.
• Results align with a principle of delayed commitment in word recognition, where multiple candidates are considered before final selection.