, 2006) did not show behavioral facilitation for stress overlap between primes and targets. There is a substantial difference this website between spoken and written targets. While visual target words are directly accessible as a whole, spoken target words unfold in time. Thus, pre-activation of word form representations exerted by the primes is directly used for recognizing written targets ( Ashby & Martin, 2008). By contrast, spoken words are initially compatible with several alternatives and initial stress of the targets is available later than initial phonemes are available (see above). Thus, stress

overlap between prime and target might be a less promising cue for guiding the lexical decision responses than is phoneme overlap between primes

and targets in unimodal auditory priming experiments. Here we argue that over the course of the experiment participants adopted a phoneme-based strategy to guide their lexical decision responses. In order to make the present procedure appropriate for the recording of ERPs, we repeated each target word four times (once in each condition), across four blocks. If only the first block with no repetition of the targets is considered, comparable Alectinib trends for phoneme priming and stress priming were obtained. Over the whole experiment, robust phoneme priming emerges, but stress priming does not survive. Hence, phoneme priming might be modulated by strategic mechanisms related to the repetition of the target words. Given our materials, target words start to differ from their minimal onset pair members as well

as from their respective pseudowords(*) at the position of the second syllables’ vowels (second nucleus, e.g., Alter  [Engl. age], Altar [Engl. altar], *Alti, *Altopp). Mainly due to their shorter initial syllables, the second nucleus of the initially unstressed targets is available earlier than that of the initially stressed targets (see Section 2). Following initial familiarization with the materials in the first block, participants might have focused more strongly on phonemes in order to detect the uniqueness and deviation points inherent to the repeatedly presented materials than Ponatinib they have focused on syllable stress. Most intriguingly, we replicate independence of ERP phoneme priming and ERP stress priming. This is support for our assumption that phoneme-relevant information, on the one hand, and prosody-relevant information, on the other hand, are not only separately extracted as sketched by the asymmetric sampling in time hypothesis (Poeppel, 2003), but also follow separate routes in the complex recognition process. The present ERP results are evidence for phoneme-free prosodic representations coding for syllable stress, but not for phonemes. Further research has to explore how much detail those prosodic representations at the syllable level code for.