Phonological Priming Between Monosyllabic Spoken Words

Phonological priming between 3-phoneme monosyllabic spoken words was examined as a function of the early or late position of the phonological overlap between the words and of prime-target relative frequency. The pairs of words had either the 2 beginning or the 2 final phonemes in common. Four experiments were conducted, each using a different combination of interstimulus interval (ISI; either 20 ms or 500 ms) and task (either lexical decision or shadowing). Facilitation was consistently found between words with final overlap in both tasks and was not affected by either absolute or relative word frequency. The size of the effect decreased as the ISI increased. Significant priming effects were not obtained between words with initial overlap, although an inhibitory trend was found in the shadowing task at the short ISI for the low-high relative frequency condition. It is suggested that the facilitatory effect of final overlap is prelexical.