Do They Know It's Christmash? Lexical Knowledge Directly Impacts Speech Perception.

We recently reported strong, replicable (i.e., replicated) evidence for lexically mediated compensation for coarticulation (LCfC; Luthra et al., 2021), whereby lexical knowledge influences a prelexical process. Critically, evidence for LCfC provides robust support for interactive models of cognition that include top-down feedback and is inconsistent with autonomous models that allow only feedforward processing. McQueen, Jesse, and Mitterer (2023) offer five counter-arguments against our interpretation; we respond to each of those arguments here and conclude that top-down feedback provides the most parsimonious explanation of extant data.