The Influence of Native-Language Phonology on Lexical Access: Exemplar-Based Versus Abstract Lexical Entries

C. Pallier; Angels Colomé; Núria Sebastián-Gallés

doi:10.1111/1467-9280.00383

The Influence of Native-Language Phonology on Lexical Access: Exemplar-Based Versus Abstract Lexical Entries

C. Pallier¹; Angels Colomé²; Núria Sebastián-Gallés²

¹ Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistiques, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France · ² Departament de Psicologia Bàsica, Universitat de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

Psychological Science 2001 open access

This study used medium-term auditory repetition priming to investigate word-recognition processes. Highly fluent Catalan-Spanish bilinguals whose first language was either Catalan or Spanish were tested in a lexical decision task involving Catalan words and nonwords. Spanish-dominant individuals, but not Catalan-dominant individuals, exhibited repetition priming for minimal pairs differing in only one feature that is nondistinctive in Spanish (e.g.,[see text]), thereby indicating that they processed these words as homophones. This finding provides direct evidence both that word recognition uses a language-specific phonological representation and that lexical entries are stored in the mental lexicon as abstract forms.

DOI: 10.1111/1467-9280.00383
Volume: 12 (6)
Pages: 445-449
Language: en
Export: BibTeX
Sources: crossref openalex