PHONOLOGICAL PRIMING OF LEXICAL RETRIEVAL IN SPEECH PRODUCTION

We report a series of three experiments exploring phonological priming effects in speech production. In all cases, subjects repeated aloud auditorily presented primes and then named picture targets. Experiment 1 showed that targets were named faster when prime and target shared phonemes but only when these occupied the same word or syllabic positions. Experiment 2 showed that the degree of facilitation was unaffected by the lexicality of the prime or whether shared phonemes occurred early or late in the syllable. Experiment 3 examined the effect of the lexicality of the prime at different intervals between response and prime in an attempt to tease apart contributions to the effect from automatic and strategic processes. The results are considered in relation to current accounts of lexical retrieval.