As learners were advancedlevel, it is safe to assume that that ‘carrot’ was part of their
existing vocabulary store and a strong candidate for activation. Nevertheless, several aspects
potentially militated against its recognition. One was that learners did not feel confident that
‘carrot’ was appropriate in the given context, nor were unaware that ‘carrot’ may also refer
to a kind of incentive, a text problem. Either of these conditions could have overruled it as a
choice. A process problem was that, rather than a word boundary being identified between
‘carrot’ and ‘to’, the weak form of the word ‘to’, i.e., /tә/, was perceived as affixed to
‘carrot’. Learners appeared to have perceived /kærrәtә/, which is a close approximation to
the sound sequence for ‘character’. Notably, for 9 of the learners who had made a best match
with ‘character’, they had been unable to process the remainder of the clause, i.e., ‘to
promote recycling’, suggesting the misperception had created confusion and inhibited their
listening and meaningmaking