Two auditory priming experiments tested whether the effect of final phonological overlap relies on syllabic representations. Amount of shared phonemic information and syllabic status of the overlap between nonword primes and targets were varied orthogonally. In the related conditions, CV.CCVC items shared the last syllable (e.g., vi.klyd-p[image…

While the vast majority of linguistic processes apply locally, consonant harmony appears to be an exception. In this phonological process, consonants share the same value of a phonological feature, such as secondary place of articulation. In sibilant harmony, [s] and [esh] ("sh") alternate such that if a word contains the sound [esh], all [s]…

Listeners of various languages tend to perceive an illusory vowel inside consonant clusters that are illegal in their native language. Here, we test whether this phenomenon arises after phoneme categorization or rather interacts with it. We assess the perception of illegal consonant clusters in native speakers of Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese,…

We examined the effects of letter-transposition in Hebrew in three masked-priming experiments. Hebrew, like English has an alphabetic orthography where sequential and contiguous letter strings represent phonemes. However, being a Semitic language it has a non-concatenated morphology that is based on root derivations. Experiment 1 showed that…

The strongest support for feedback in speech perception comes from evidence of apparent lexical influence on prelexical fricative-stop compensation for coarticulation. Lexical knowledge (e.g., that the ambiguous final fricative of "Christma?" should be [s]) apparently influences perception of following stops. We argue that all such previous…

Many accounts of working memory posit specialized storage mechanisms for the maintenance of serial order. We explore an alternative, that maintenance is achieved through temporary activation in the language production architecture. Four experiments examined the extent to which the phonological similarity effect can be explained as a sublexical…

Infants become selectively sensitive to phonological distinctions relevant to their native language at an early age. One might expect that infants bring some of this phonological knowledge to bear in encoding the words they subsequently acquire. In line with this expectation, studies have found that 14-month-olds are sensitive to mispronunciations…

The role of segment similarity in early (i.e., partially learned) lexical entries was assessed using artificial lexicons in a referential context. During a learning phase participants heard 40 nonsense words, each accompanied by an unfamiliar picture. In testing, participants heard the direction ''Click on the [X]'', and chose which of four…

Nonwords created by transposing two "adjacent" letters (i.e., transposed-letter (TL) nonwords like "jugde") are very effective at activating the lexical representation of their base words. This fact poses problems for most computational models of word recognition (e.g., the interactive-activation model and its extensions), which assume that exact…