Figure 1.

Two competing accounts of how prior lexical or phonological knowledge from written text influences decisions about perceived (acoustic) clarity of vocoded speech. Gray colored boxes indicate the representations that are that potentially modified by written text in each account. A) Top-down account: prior knowledge influences early acoustic processing prior to the decision stage (as in McClelland & Elman, 1986). B) Bottom-up account: prior knowledge and acoustic information are combined at a late decision stage without modulating early acoustic processing (as in Norris et al., 2000).