A day in the life of a spoken word.

Two experiments tracked the emergence of lexical

competition effects for newly learnt spoken words (e.g.,

"cathedruke"). Experiment 1 compared form-only learning

with learning in semantically rich sentence contexts. In both

cases, although immediate explicit recognition of the novel

words was good, lexical competition effects (e.g.,

"cathedruke-cathedral") emerged only after a delay of at least 24 hours. Experiment 2 evaluated the timecourse of learning in more detail and used embedding (rather than cohort) new competitors (e.g., "shadowks"). Again results showed no evidence of lexicalization immediately after exposure, but clear lexical competition effects after 24 hours. Furthermore, recognition and free recall improved over time. These results are interpreted in terms of a consolidation process that integrates words into the mental lexicon over a relatively protracted period of time.