Abstract
The selective adaptation methodology is used to determine whether auditory word recognition is a fully bottom-up autonomous process or a top-down process within a more interactive setting. The study investigates the possible impact of lexical influences on the observed pattern of phonemic activation. The findings lend support for the top-down process theory. They suggest that adaptation happens at a sublexical level and interceded by phoneme or phoneme-like representations that arise from top-down lexical to phonemic activation.