This question is addressed by investigating the effects of priming a word presented in the context of an attention-demanding tone discrimination task. The results reveal a rich pattern in which resource attention affects, and is affected by, the activation and maintenance of meaning during word recognition. The lexical level is marked by competitive effects associated with similarity neighborhood activation, whereas increased probabilities of segments and sequences of segments facilitate processing at the sublexical level. I will discuss a series of studies that provide support for the hypothesis that the processing of spoken stimuli is a function of both facilitative effects associated with increased phonotactic probabilities and competitive effects associated with the activation of similarity neighborhoods. Everyday conceptual life is based on integrating clashes and compressing vital relations.
Life is various and often diffuse.
Its many lines of connection run simultaneously over large expanses of time and space and involve complicated relations of change, cause and effect, intentionality, identity, analogy, and representation. To form a conceptual apparatus and use it requires constant and frequent compressions over these vital relations. Compression is so natural to us that when literature uses them to compress large worlds of life into a few pages, we hardly notice. When we imagine how we would now answer a criticism directed at us several years ago, we are compressing over times. We compress over time when we tell someone our life story in three minutes.