ASA 127th Meeting M.I.T. 1994 June 6-10

4pSP2. Repetition priming in auditory word recognition.

Dept. of Psychol., Univ. at Albany, SUNY, Albany, NY 12222

Repetition priming, faster response times to a word when it is preceded by an identical rather than an unrelated prime, has been repeatedly obtained using diverse methodologies and stimuli. However Slowiaczek and Hamburger [J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cognit. 18, 1239--1250 (1992)] failed to find repetition priming for auditorily primed, monosyllabic, auditory words. They suggested that strategic processing caused by list context effects was responsible. Repetition priming, however, was not obtained when strategic processing was reduced [M. B. Hamburger and L. M. Slowiaczek, J. Exp. Psychol. Learn. Mem. Cognit. (under review)]. The current experiments further investigate repetition priming in auditory word recognition. Subjects shadowed auditorily presented targets preceded by unrelated, phonologically similar, or identical auditory primes. Phonological similarity [whether prime-target pairs shared one phoneme (low similarity) or three phonemes (high similarity)] and likelihood of strategic processing were manipulated. Results demonstrated that repetition priming can be found for auditorily primed, monosyllabic, auditory words when subjects are not exposed to high similarity, phonologically related prime-target pairs. This effect is greater when strategic processing is reduced. [Work supported by NIH grant NS-29286-03.]