Testing discrete and cascaded hypotheses of phoneme retrieval through Primed lexical decision taskTesting Discrete and Cascaded Hypotheses of Phoneme Retrieval Through Primed Lexical Decision Task

Abstract

Lexical access is the retrieval of appropriate word from the lexicon. Retrieval of phonemic segments is the final step in lexical retrieval. Two hypotheses, namely the cascaded and discrete hypotheses of phoneme retrieval, have been proposed in regard to how phoneme retrieval takes place. The discrete hypothesis suggests that phoneme retrieval takes place only for the shortlisted lexical node, while the cascaded hypothesis proposes that phoneme retrieval takes place for the competitor lexical nodes also. These two hypotheses were tested using lexical decision task. Two lists of prime–target stimuli were used. The first list comprised phonemically related and unrelated prime–target, while the second list consisted of phonemically mediated prime and target stimuli. Statistically significant difference between related and unrelated stimuli was observed only for list 1 suggesting that cascaded hypothesis may not be applicable in real-time lexical access.