Missing information in spoken word recognition: Nonreleased stop consonants

Cross-modal semantic priming and phoneme monitoring experiments investigated processing of word-final nonreleased stop consonants (e.g., kit may be pronounced /kIt/ or /kI/), which are common phonological variants in American English. Both voiced /d/ and voiceless /t/ segments were presented in release and no-release versions. A cross-modal semantic priming task (Experiment 1) showed comparable priming for /d/ and /t/ versions. A second set of stimuli ending in /s/ were presented as intact, missing /s/, or with a mismatching final segment and showed significant but reduced priming for the latter two conditions. Experiment 2 showed that phoneme monitoring reaction time for release and no-release words and onset mismatching stimuli (derived pseudowords) increased as acoustic-phonetic similarity to the intended word decreased. The results suggest that spoken word recognition does not require special mechanisms for processing no-release variants. Rather, the results can be accounted for by means of existing assumptions concerning probabilistic activation that is based on partial activation.