Feedback on feedback on feedback: It's feedforward

The central thesis of our target article is that feedback is never necessary in spoken word recognition. In this response we begin by clarifying some terminological issues that have led to a number of misunderstandings. We provide some new arguments that the feedforward model Merge is indeed more parsimonious than the interactive alternatives, and that it provides a more con­ vincing account of the data than alternative models. Finally, we extend the arguments to deal with new issues raised by the com­ mentators such as infant speech perception and neural architec­ ture.