The Auditory Priming Effect in Japanese Learners of English: Effects of Voice Specificity and Word Stress Patterns

Exposure to a linguistic stimulus during priming influences subsequent language processing (McDonough & Trofimovich 2009: 1). For instance, people tend to effectively process spoken words that they have previously encountered without noticing that they are doing so. Similarly, in an auditory repetition task, people are likely to repeat previously heard auditory input faster and more accurately than previously unheard words. This example of priming is called the auditory priming effect. This effect is thought to occur as people unconsciously encode and store phonetic and/or phonological information for encountered words in their memory. Thus, on encountering the same words again later, they can retrieve them efficiently using the stored information (Ohta 2008: 104). Since they do not recall episodic memory from the previous situation in which they encountered these words, priming is seemingly related to implicit memory (Murao & Sasaki 2008: 67).