# Rime Priming Effects in Spoken Word Recognition: Are They Really Due to the Rime?

## TL;DR

This study investigates whether rime priming effects in spoken word recognition depend on the rime itself or just final phoneme overlap.

## Contribution

The study proposes a new account of phonological priming using the TISK model, involving position-independent phoneme and bi-phone representations.

## Key findings

- Significant priming effects were found in both rime and transposed-phoneme rime conditions.
- The priming effect was stronger in the original rime condition compared to the transposed-phoneme condition.
- The results suggest activation of position-independent phoneme and bi-phone representations.

## Abstract

Abstract: In this study, we re-examined the facilitation that occurs when auditorily presented monosyllabic primes and targets share their final phonemes, and in particular the rime (e.g., /vɔʀd/–/kɔʀd/). More specifically, we asked whether this rime facilitation effect is also observed when the two last consonants of the rime are transposed (e.g., /vɔʀd/–/kɔʀd/). In comparison to a control condition in which the primes and the targets were unrelated (e.g., /pylt/–/kɔʀd/), we found significant priming effects in both the rime (/vɔdʀ/–/kɔʀd/) and the transposed-phoneme “rime” /vɔdʀ/–/kɔʀd/ conditions. We also observed a significantly greater priming effect in the former condition than in the latter condition. We use the theoretical framework of the TISK model (Hannagan et al., 2013) to propose a novel account of final overlap phonological priming in terms of activation of both position-independent phoneme representations and bi-phone representations.