Levels of perceptual representation and process in lexical access: Words, phonemes, and features.

Marslen-Wilson, William, Warren, Paul·1994·Psychological Review

Abstract

Three experiments and a simulation study investigate competing featural and phonemic views of the representation of the speech input in access to the mental lexicon. Auditory lexical decision and gating tasks show that the processing consequences of subcategorical mismatches (conflicts between phonetic cues to speech segment identity) depend on the lexical status of the conflicting cues, such that conflicts that only involve nonwords do not disrupt performance. A further study, using a phonetic-decision task with the same stimuli, found the same pattern. A simulation study shows that the interactive activation model TRACE, with top-down feedback to a prelexical phonemic level, does not model these effects successfully. The authors argue instead for a direct access featural model, based on a distributed computational substrate, where featural information is mapped directly onto lexical representations.

Cited by (5)

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  2. Non-lexical conversational sounds in American English
    Ward, Nigel · 2006 · Pragmatics & Cognition
  3. Pitch accent in spoken-word recognition in Japanese.
    Cutler, Anne, Otake, Takashi · 1999 · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America
  4. Letter‐position encoding and dyslexia
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  5. Where is the/b/in “absurde” [apsyrd]? It is in French listeners' minds
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This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Levels of perceptual representation and process in lexical access: Words, phonemes, and features. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1037//0033-295x.101.4.653
The paper
Marslen-Wilson, W., & Warren, P. (1994). Levels of perceptual representation and process in lexical access: Words, phonemes, and features. Psychological Review. https://doi.org/10.1037//0033-295x.101.4.653

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