Spoken-word recognition: the access to embedded words.

Two cross-modal priming experiments investigated whether the representation of either an initial- or a final-embedded word may be activated when the longer carrier word is auditorily presented. Visual targets were semantically related either to the embedded word or to the carrier word or they were unrelated to the primes. A priming effect was found for semantic associates of the carrier word in both experiments as well as for associates of the final-embedded word (Experiment 2). These results suggest that mapping speech onto lexical representations may imply lexical access attempts at several points during auditory processing of the speech signal.