Listeners tend to categorize an ambiguous speech sound so that it forms a word with its context (Ganong, 1980). This effect could reflect feedback from the lexicon to phonemic activation (McClelland & Elman, 1986), or the operation of a task-specific phonemic decision system (Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2000). Because the former account involves feedback between lexical and phonemic levels, it predicts that the lexicon's influence on phonemic decisions should be delayed and should gradually increase in strength. Previous response time experiments have not delivered a clear verdict as to whether this is the case, however. In 2 experiments, listeners' eye movements were tracked as they categorized phonemes using visually displayed response options. Lexically relevant information in the signal, the timing of which was confirmed by separate gating experiments, immediately increased eye movements toward the lexically supported response. This effect on eye movements then diminished over the course of the trial rather than continuing to increase. These results challenge the lexical feedback account. The present work also introduces a novel method for analyzing data from 'visual-world' type tasks, designed to assess when an experimental manipulation influences the probability of an eye movement toward the target. (PsycINFO Database Record

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A growing body of behavioral results demonstrates cross-linguistic sensitivity to the SSP (Daland et al. 2011; Berent et al. 2007; Berent et al. 2008; Jarosz to appear; Ren, Gao & Morgan 2010). These consistent findings suggest a role for prior bias in phonological learning, but recent modeling studies question this conclusion, showing that for some languages these preferences can be derived from the input (Daland et al. 2011; Hayes 2011). Building on these results and Jarosz’s (to appear) developmental findings for Polish, the present paper investigates adult Polish speakers’ sensitivity to the SSP experimentally and computationally. We report the results of an online acceptability judgment experiment focusing on initial clusters and present the results of computational simulations evaluating the ability of phonotactic models to predict participants’ ratings on the basis of the lexical statistics of Polish. Our main findings are that 1) SSP is predictive of adults’ ratings, 2) sonority projection arises in both attested and unattested clusters, 3) while phonotactic models have significant predictive value, they do not subsume the SSP preferences observed in the participants’ ratings, and 4) participants’ sonority sequencing preferences are not entirely compatible with the SSP, suggesting a combined effect of prior bias and experience.

The accent advantage effect in phoneme monitoring—faster responses to a target phoneme at the beginning of an L + H*-accented word than to a target phoneme at the beginning of an unaccented word—is viewed as a product of listeners' predictive capabilities [Cutler (1976). Percept. Psychophys. 20(1), 55–60]. However, previous studies have not established what information listeners use to form these predictions [Cutler (1987). Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, pp. 84–87; Cutler and Darwin (1981). Percept. Psychophys. 29(3), 217–224]. This article presents evidence that at least the information in the syllable immediately preceding a target phoneme is necessary to cue the predictive attention allocation that underlies the accent advantage effect.