The vowel phonetic priming experiment and the fricative phonetic priming experiment showed that priming based on phonetic overlap can be observed in an auditory lexical decision task. The phonetic priming paradigm provides a tool to investigate how lower-level acoustic-phonetic information is used to access lexical representations in spoken word recognition. The present results suggest that phonetic features rather than segments are active in lexical access. In future experiments, we hope to test this claim in more detail by systematically varying the acoustic-phonetic overlap between prime and target segments. Such manipulations will enable us to investigate the role of fine-grained acoustic-phonetic information (for example, coarticulatory cues or allophonic information) in lexical access processes.

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