An ERP investigation of dichotic repetition priming with temporally overlapping stimuli.

In the present study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine the effects of prime-target repetition using a dichotic priming paradigm. Participants monitored a stream of target words in the right, attended ear for occasional animal names, and ERPs were recorded to nonanimal words that were either unrelated to or a repetition of prime words presented to the left ear. The prime words were spoken in a different voice and had a lower intensity than did the target words, and the prime word onset occurred 50 ms before target word onset. Repetition-priming effects were observed in the ERPs starting around 150 ms post-target-onset and continued to influence processing for the duration of the target stimuli. These priming effects provide further evidence in favor of parallel processing of overlapping dichotic stimuli, at least up to the level of some form of sublexical phonological representation, a likely locus for the integration of the two sources of information.