New evidence for prelexical phonological processing in word recognition

When presented with stimuli that contain illegal consonant clusters, Japanese listeners tend to hear an illusory vowel that makes their perception conform to the phonotactics of their language. In a previous paper, we suggested that this effect arises from language-specific prelexical processes. The present paper assesses the alternative hypothesis that this illusion is due to a "topdown" lexical effect. We manipulate the lexical neighbourhood of nonwords that contain illegal consonant clusters and show that perception of the illusory vowel is not due to lexical influences. This demonstrates that phonotactic knowledge influences speech processing at an early stage.