Phonological abstraction before lexical access: New evidence from rime priming

Abstract

In this study, we focused on the rime priming effect and examined whether the frequency of rimes influences the size of the effect. Using the lexical decision task, we observed that the rime priming effect interacted with rime frequency with a stronger priming effect when the target words contained low-frequency rimes, in comparison with target words containing high-frequency rimes. Moreover, for both target words with low- and high-frequency rimes, a priming effect of similar magnitude was observed whether the primes and targets were pronounced by the same speaker or by different speakers. All together, these findings provide additional support for all the studies that plead for the existence of prelexical units and, in a more general way, for phonological abstraction prior to lexical access.