Speech perception subconsciously activates overlapping word candidates that compete

Evidence

Lexical competition is the process through which listeners consider all the mental representations that overlap with the heard signal as candidates for the word intended by the speaker. Before making a lexical decision listeners thus subconsciously consider multiple words, including homonyms (e.g., ‘pair’ and ‘pear’) and lexical embeddings (e.g., paint in paint ing). In optimal conditions, lexical competition is resolved (i.e. phonologically similar words are disambiguated) very early in the course of speech perception because listeners can rely on a plethora of acoustic cues that mark the difference between phonologically overlapping words (e.g., Salverda et al. 2003 ), and further also benefit from semantic information in sentences (Dahan and Tanenhaus 2004 ). — Dijk, Pim van, Physiology, Psychoacoustics and…, 3953

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines lexical competition and explains how it is normally resolved — the key construct the whole study manipulates.