Representation of lexical form.

The authors attempted to determine whether surface representations of spoken words are mapped onto underlying, abstract representations. In particular, they tested the hypothesis that flaps—neutralized allophones of intervocalic /t/s and /d/s—are mapped onto their underlying phonemic counterparts. In 6 repetition priming experiments, participants responded to stimuli in 2 blocks of trials. Stimuli in the 1st block served as primes and those in the 2nd as targets. Primes and targets consisted of English words containing intervocalic /t/s and /d/s that, when produced casually, were flapped. In all 6 experiments, reaction times to target items were measured as a function of prime type. The results provide evidence for both surface and underlying form-based representations. Information-processing theories have typically characterized spoken word perception as being composed of a series of linguistic stages of analysis, with form-based (or sound-based) representations becoming successively more abstract at each stage of processing. Studdert-Kennedy (1974) provided one of the earliest explicit articulations of this kind of mediated lexical access model, which itself drew inspiration from linguistic theory (see Bloomfield, 1933; Chomsky & Halle, 1968; Harris, 1955; Kenstowicz & Kisseberth, 1979; see also Jusczyk & Luce, 2002, for a discussion). More contemporary examples of mediated access can be found in computational models of spoken word recognition such as TRACE (McClelland & Elman, 1986), Shortlist (Norris, 1994), and PARSYN (Luce, Goldinger, Auer, & Vitevitch, 2000).