Phoneme-free prosodic representations are involved in pre-lexical and lexical neurobiological mechanisms underlying spoken word processing

Recently we reported that spoken stressed and unstressed primes differently modulate Event Related Potentials (ERPs) of spoken initially stressed targets. ERP stress priming was independent of prime–target phoneme overlap. Here we test whether phoneme-free ERP stress priming involves the lexicon. We used German target words with the same onset phonemes but different onset stress, such as MANdel (“almond”) and manDAT (“mandate”; capital letters indicate stress). First syllables of those words served as primes. We orthogonally varied prime–target overlap in stress and phonemes. ERP stress priming did neither interact with phoneme priming nor with the stress pattern of the targets. However, polarity of ERP stress priming was reversed to that previously obtained. The present results are evidence for phoneme-free prosodic processing at the lexical level. Together with the previous results they reveal that phoneme-free prosodic representations at the pre-lexical and lexical level are recruited by neurobiological spoken word recognition.