| Gaia: | How does the mental lexicon cope with phonetic variants in recognition of spoken words? Using a lexical decision task with and without fragment priming, the authors compared the processing of German words and pseudowords that differed only in the place of articulation of the initial consonant (<em>place</em>). Across both experiments, event-related brain potentials indicated that pseudowords with initial noncoronal place (e.g., *<em>Brachen</em>) activate words with initial coronal place (e.g., <em>Drachen</em> [dragon]). In contrast, coronal pseudowords (e.g., *<em>Drenze</em>) do not as effectively activate noncoronal words (e.g., <em>Grenze</em> [border]). Thus, certain word onset variations do not hamper the speech recognition system. The authors interpret this asymmetry as a consequence of underspecified coronal place of articulation in the mental lexicon.
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