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Research suggests for people who speak two languages the target language and the language not being used are simultaneously activated. Fluent Catalan-Spanish users took longer to reject phonemes appearing in Spanish words than in the control word when deciding if phonemes were in the Catalan name of a picture.

Previous reports suggest that initial phonemes are monitored on the basis of lexical information in monosyllabic words and on the basis of acoustic/phonetic information in multisyllabic words (Cutler, Mehler, Norris, & Segui, 1987). In Experiment 1, a frequency effect was found with item-initial phoneme monitoring for monosyllabic but not for bisyllabic words. In Experiments 2 and 3, we used speech time-compressed at a rate of 50% and failed to find a frequency effect for bisyllabic words, even though they were shorter than uncompressed monosyllables. In Experiment 4, we used a lexical decision task on the same items and found a frequency effect for both mono- and bisyllabic words. Results are interpreted on the basis of the dual code hypothesis. Implications for the nature of the prelexical code are discussed.

In a series of 16 experiments, the reaction time to decide which of two stop consonants, /b/ or /p/, for example, was the initial phoneme of a single target-bearing item was measured. In half of the experiments word frequency was varied and in other half, lexical status (words vs. nonwords) was varied. When listeners had only to monitor the target-bearing items for the initial consonant, nonsignificant effects of word frequency and lexical status were found. However, with the addition of a secondary task that focused attention on the consequences of lexical processing by requiring listeners to indicate whether the target-bearing item was a noun or verb or a word or nonword, highly reliable lexial effects were obtained: phoneme monitoring times were faster for high than for low frequency words and faster for words than for nonwords. A secondary task that required a judgment regarding item duration did not yield reliable effects of frequency or lexical status. Finally, degrading the targets with pink noise also resulted in reliable lexical effects. An explanation of the results was offered that rested on the following assumptions: (1) compensation (i.e., a race) normally exists between which representation, the pre- or postlexical, will be the basis for phoneme decisions, with the prelexical code the usual winner, but that (2) attention to postlexical representations may at times override the consequences of the competition between representations.

TRACE simulation that explains the failure of induced delays in phoneme recognition is presented. Although previously tested conditions failed to produce lexically induced delay effects because the input was too unambiguous and the control condition was conflated with lexical status and neighborhood structure.

Two experiments are used to test a variety of measures from both classes of theoretically driven measures based on phonological features, and empirically driven measures based on confusability for their ability to predict judgments of similarity between English consonants. The extent to which confusability depends on phoneme similarity is examined.