Are there really interactive processes in speech perception?

Abstract

On both empirical and theoretical grounds, we argue that the affirmative answer of McClelland et al. [1] is premature. Contrary to the predictions of the TRACE model, which postulates interactive processing in speech perception, there is no lexically mediated compensation for coarticulation when there is a lexical bias in interpretation of the preceding fricative [2]. This cannot be dismissed with criticism of the fricative-final lexical contexts and their distance from the stops (Box 3 in Ref. [1]);