This article addresses the questions of how and when lexical information influences phoneme identification in a series of phoneme-monitoring experiments in which conflicting predictions of autonomous and interactive models were evaluated. Strong facilitatory lexical effects (reflected by large differences in detection latencies to targets in words and matched nonwords) were found only when targets came after the uniqueness point of the target-bearing word. Furthermore, no evidence was obtained for lexically mediated inhibition on phoneme identification as predicted by the interactive activation model TRACE. These results taken together point to strong limitations in the way in which lexical information can affect the perception of unambiguous speech.

The primary use of sequence monitoring (also known as syllable or fragment monitoring) has been to determine which linguistic units are involved in word recognition, and how these units might differ across languages. The task involves presenting subjects with targets that are either congruent or incongruent with a linguistic unit in the target-bearing item. Faster detection latencies to congruent targets are taken to indicate their perceptual relevance. For example, the finding that subjects are faster to detect a target when it corresponds to the érst syllable of the carrier than when it corresponds to more or less than the first syllable is called a syllable effect. This effect is interpreted as evidence for the perceptual relevance of the syllable. Since most research with this task has focused on the generalisability of the syllable effect across languages, this paper will focus primarily on this effect

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