MONITORING THE LEXICON WITH NORMAL AND COMPRESSED SPEECH - FREQUENCY-EFFECTS AND THE PRELEXICAL CODE

Previous reports suggest that initial phonemes are monitored on the basis of lexical information in monosyllabic words and on the basic of acoustic/phonetic information in multisyllabic words (Cutler, Mehler, Norris, & Segui, 1987). In Experiment 1, a frequency effect was found with item-initial phoneme monitoring for monosyllabic but not for bisyllabic words. In Experiments 2 and 3, we used speech time-compressed at a rate of 50% and failed to find a frequency effect for bisyllabic words, even though they were shorter than uncompressed monosyllables. In Experiment 4, we used a lexical decision task on the same items and found a frequency effect for both mono- and bisyllabic words. Results are interpreted on the basis of the dual code hypothesis. Implications for the nature of the prelexical code are Discussed. © 1990.