**Stimuli** Stimuli consists of 288 monosyllablic words recorded by a male native English speaker with an English accent. These words were arranged into four groups of 72 words; repeated, unrelated primes, unrelated targets and new memory test items which were counterbalanced for each experiment. The words in the four groups were balanced in terms of frequency, imageability, length in phonemes and length in letters. The mismatched word pairs consist of a unrelated prime and unrelated target. The unrelated prime is the first clear word and the unrelated targed is the second noise-vocoded (NV) word. The content of the mismatched condition was randomised between the four groups with six possible combinations of words (each with no phonological, semantic, or associative similarities between the target and the prime). The intelligibility of the targets were manipulated using a noise-vocoding technique (Shannon et al., 1995). **Procedure** 144 trials (72 for each condition). Each trial consists of a matched (same word) or mismatched (different word) pair. The first word acting as a clear prime for the second degraded target. Participants were asked to rate the 'noisiness' of of the degraded speech on a scale of 1 to 5. Half of the participants attend to the word pair priming task, half attend to a visual distraction task in which a series of images of ambiguous black shapes are presented on a white background, the participant must indicate every time a repeat is present (nback). Experiment ends with surprise recognition memory test; includes all 144 words from the mismatched condition in the previous task (72 unrelated primes, 72 unrelated targets) and 72 new words. Participants make old/new discrimination on a 6 point scale. EEG recordings were acquired throughout the experiment using a Biosemi ActiveTwo 128-channel system.