SEMANTIC PRIMING IN A SINGLE-WORD SHADOWING TASK

in recent work using a single-word shadowing task, Slowiaczek and Hamburger (1992) reported facilitation in response times for auditory targets preceded by auditory but not visual primes that shared one initial phoneme, and interference for targets preceded by auditory or visual primes that shared three initial phonemes. Because interference occurred with word primes but not with nonword primes, it was interpreted as resulting from competition among phonologically similar lexical representations. In the present investigation, whether the single-word shadowing task does indeed involve accessing lexical representations was examined in two semantic priming experiments. Subjects repeated aloud auditorily presented target words that were preceded by unrelated, semantically related, or identical primes. Semantic priming was obtained whether the auditory target words were preceded by auditorily or visually presented primes. The results support the position that like the naming of visually presented words, the single-word shadowing task involves accessing lexical memory. As a result, this task provides an appropriate means of examining the organization of lexical memory and auditory word recognition processes.