To test the hypothesis that native language (L1) phonology can affect the lexical representations of nonnative words, a visual semantic-relatedness decision task in English was given to native speakers and nonnative speakers whose L1 was Japanese or Arabic. In the critical conditions, the word pair contained a homophone or near-homophone of a…

Time is essential to speech. The duration of speech segments plays a critical role in the perceptual identification of these segments, and therefore in that of spoken words. Here, using a French word identification task, we show that vowels are perceived as shorter when attention is divided between two tasks, as compared to a single task control…

Three experiments examined the involvement of orthography in spoken word processing using a task--unimodal auditory priming with offset overlap--taken to reflect activation of prelexical representations. Two types of prime-target relationship were compared; both involved phonological overlap, but only one had a strong orthographic overlap (e.g.,…

Two experiments investigated sensory/motor-based functional knowledge of man-made objects: manipulation features associated with the actual usage of objects. In Experiment 1, a series of prime-target pairs was presented auditorily, and participants were asked to make a lexical decision on the target word. Participants made a significantly faster…

The influence of orthography on children's on-line auditory word recognition was studied from the end of Grade 2 to the end of Grade 4, by examining the orthographic consistency effect [Ziegler, J. C., & Ferrand, L. (1998). Orthography shapes the perception of speech: The consistency effect in auditory recognition. "Psychonomic Bulletin & Review",…

We addressed the hypothesis that word segmentation based on statistical regularities occurs without the need of attention. Participants were presented with a stream of artificial speech in which the only cue to extract the words was the presence of statistical regularities between syllables. Half of the participants were asked to passively listen…