This might have driven the different responses to both types of targets, namely the slower responses and delayed ERPs to initially stressed target words. Crucially, however, type of target did not interact with ERP priming effects. Due to this, stress match and stress mismatch included the very same primes and target words, though in different combinations: Stress Match included stressed primes followed by initially stressed targets AND unstressed primes followed by initially unstressed targets. Stress Mismatch included unstressed primes followed Protease Inhibitor Library cell line by initially

stressed targets AND stressed primes followed by initially unstressed targets (see Table 1B). Thus, ERP stress priming cannot be deduced to inherent timing or linguistic differences between initially stressed and initially unstressed target words. We used unimodal auditory word onset priming to characterize

the function of prosody-relevant information in spoken word processing. Selumetinib In line with our former studies (Friedrich et al., 2004 and Schild et al., 2014), ERPs are indicative for processing of syllable stress that is independent from the processing of phoneme-relevant information. We found independent ERP stress priming and ERP phoneme priming. This is strong evidence for phoneme-free prosodic processing across the complex stream of spoken word recognition. Differential ERP stress priming effects across our studies suggest that phoneme-free prosodic processing serves several functions in the complex speech recognition stream. In the light of absent stress priming in the reaction time data, the ERPs reveal that lexical decision latencies obtained in word onset priming do not track those aspects of spoken word processing. The present ERP stress priming effect is partly comparable with that obtained why in our previous cross-modal auditory–visual study (Friedrich et al., 2004 and Friedrich et al., 2004). We found enhanced posterior negativity for stress mismatch compared to stress match, though in addition to this effect we found frontal stress priming with opposite polarity to the posterior one. Thus it appears that spoken primes modulate

more aspects of the processing of spoken targets (present study) than they modulate aspects of the processing of written targets (previous cross-modal study). However, based on comparably enhanced posterior negativity for stress mismatch in the present unimodal study and the former cross-modal study, we conclude that target modality does not alter the polarity of the posterior negativity related to stress priming. Thus the unique stress priming effect obtained in our previous unimodal auditory study (Schild et al., 2014) has to be linked to other differences between studies. We might conclude that the unbalanced sequence of stressed and unstressed syllables has driven the stress priming effect in our former unimodal auditory study.