Contextual coherence and attention in phoneme monitoring

In a series of experiments (Eimas, Hornstein, & Payton, Journal of Memory and Language, 1990, 29, 160–180), secondary tasks that required lexical knowledge induced lexical effects on phoneme monitoring times when the target-bearing items were presented in isolation. Lexical effects were not found in the absence of secondary tasks. In the present series of experiments in which the same target-bearing items were embedded in sentential contexts, lexical effects were not obtained with or without a secondary task. A word frequency effect was obtained, however, when target-bearing words were embedded in incoherent contexts composed of randomly ordered word strings, but only when a secondary task was required. The influence of sentential coherence and processing demands and their relation to the focus of attention during phoneme monitoring was discussed along with the role of lexical knowledge on the formation of a prelexical, presumably phonetic code during perception of connected speech.

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