Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Earlier research suggests that the lexical access process in humans is highly intolerant of mismatch. When heard in isolation, a sequence such as [wikib] (wickib) is unacceptable as a token of wicked even though the mismatch is minimal. This observation is apparently inconsistent with the vulnerability of natural speech to phonological change. For example, the word wicked m a y be phonetically realised as [wikib] in the context of "wicked prank". This is an example of place assimilation, where the underlying /d/ in wicked acquires a labial character from the foUowing labial consonant. The cross-modal priming experiments reported here test the hypothesis that phonologically regular variation does not in fact create mismatch when it occurs in the appropriate context. Subjects heard tokens like [wikib] embedded in either phonologically viable context (where the following word was prank) or in unviable context (where the following word was game ) . When heard in unviable context, the distorted tokens produced a strong mismatch effect In contrast, the distorted tokens in viable context primed as strongly as the undistorted words. These results suggest that the on-line processes of speech interpretation and lexical access must perform some kind of phonological inferencing when interpreting speech at the lexical level.