Abstractness, allomorphy, and lexical architecture

Two intra-modal immediate repetition priming experiments ask whether speech inputs can link directly to abstract underlying representations, or whether access is mediated via intervening "access representations" of each word's surface phonetic form. Experiment 1 showed that auditory-auditory priming between morphologically related derived/stem pairs (such as excitement/excite) was not affected by allomorphic variation in the phonetic form of the stem in prime and target (as in sanity/sane). Experiment 2 showed that interference effects between suffixed primes and targets sharing the same stem (as in excitement/excitable) were also unaffected by stem variation (as in sanity/sanely). These results, which cannot be attributed to either semantic or phonological factors, are problematic for mediated access theories and point to direct access from speech to abstract representations at the level of the lexical entry.