Phonological code activation during listening

Rhyme priming to visually dissimilar rhymes (e. g., eight-late) was used in a lexical decision task to investigate the access and maintenance of speech-based codes in sentence comprehension. One member of the rhyme pair was embedded in a sentence and the other was presented visually for lexical decision. Rhyme priming obtained when the prime and target were separated by four but not by seven intervening words, suggesting that the phonological code for the word was initially accessed and then rapidly decayed.The research in this paper was initially presented at the 1982 Meetings of the Midwestern Psychological Association held in Minneapolis. This research was supported by NSF grant IST 80-2439 and by NIH grant HD 1619-01.