EFFECTS OF SENSORY INFORMATION AND PROCESSING TIME IN SPOKEN-WORD RECOGNITION

Current models of spoken-word recognition describe access to lexical representations in terms of activation and decay. This research investigated an important aspect of activation, that is the impact of processing time. In the natural situation of continuous speech, the more acoustic information a listener receives about a word, the more time is available to process earlier parts of this input. These two naturally confounded aspects of spoken-word processing-sensory input and time-were investigated in a cross-modal priming study. The results showed a separable impact of time and signal on the activational state of lexical elements.