Rime priming effects in spoken word recognition Are they really due to the rime?

• Dufour Sophie
• Mirault Jonathan
• Grainger Jonathan

• Final overlap priming
• Position-independent phonemes
• TISK model
• Spoken word recognition final overlap priming position-independent phonemes TISK model
• Spoken word recognition

In this study we reexamined the facilitation that occurs when auditorily presented monosyllabic primes and targets share their final phonemes, and in particular the rime (e.g., /vɔʀd/-/kɔʀd/). More specifically, we asked whether this rime facilitation effect is also observed when the two last consonants of the rime are transposed (e.g., /vɔdʀ/-/kɔʀd/). In comparison to a control condition in which the primes and the targets were unrelated (e.g., /pylt/-/kɔʀd/), we found significant priming effects in both the rime (/vɔʀd/-/kɔʀd/) and the transposed-phoneme "rime" /vɔdʀ/-/kɔʀd/ conditions. We also observed a significantly greater priming effect in the former than in the latter condition. We use the theoretical framework of the TISK model (Hannagan et al., 2013) to propose a novel account of final overlap phonological priming in terms of activation of both position-independent phoneme representations and bi-phone representations.