Inhibitory priming effect in auditory of the phonological mismatch length

Three experiments examined lexical competition effects using the phonological priming paradigm in a shadowing task. Experiment 1 replicated Hamburger and Slowiaczek’ s [1] finding of an initial overlap inhibition when primes and targets share three phonemes (/b iz/-/b ik/) but not when they share two phonemes (/b z/-/b ik/). This observation suggests that lexical competition depends on the number of shared phonemes between primes and targets. However, Experiment 2 showed that an overlap of two phonemes was sufficient t o cause inhibition when the primes mismatched the targets only on the last phoneme (/bol/-/bot/). Conversely, using a three phonemes overlap, no inhibition was observed in Experiment 3 when the primes mismatched the targets on the last twophonemes (/ba t/-/ba aj/). The data indicate that what essentially determines prime-target competition effects in word-form priming is the number of mismatching phonemes.