On lexical and sublexical contributions to transposed-phoneme priming effects.

Speech input like [byt] has been shown to facilitate not only the subsequent processing of an identical target word /byt/ but also that of a target word /tyb/ that contains the same phonemes in a different order. In the TISK model of spoken word recognition (Hannagan et al., Frontiers in psychology, 4, 563, 2013), this transposed-phoneme priming effect could result from the activation of shared position-independent phonemes (i.e., a sublexical effect) or pre-activation of the lexical representation corresponding to the transposed-phoneme target word by the prime (i.e., a lexical effect). In this study, we aimed to distinguish sublexical and lexical contributions to transposed-phoneme priming effects by (1) manipulating the lexical status of primes, and (2) examining if transposed-phoneme effects occur when targets are nonwords. An inhibitory transposed-phoneme priming effect was observed when target nonwords (e.g., /tad/) were preceded by transposed-phoneme word primes (e.g., /dat/). In contrast, there was a small non-significant facilitatory priming effect when target nonwords (e.g., /nuk/) were preceded by transposed-phoneme nonword primes (/kun/). These findings point to a greater contribution of lexical representations than sublexical representations in driving transposed-phoneme priming effects.