 Regarding phoneme restoration, it could be that the effect is driven by listeners’ drawing on information stored in a language-proprietary database (specifically, information about the linguistic types in the lexicon of English), rather than higher-level contextual information. Hence, it’s unclear whether the case of phoneme restoration described above counts as a top-down effect. But not all cases of phoneme restoration can be accommodated so readily, since the phenomenon also occurs when there are multiple lexical items available for filling in (Warren &amp; Warren, 1970). For example, listeners fill the gap in the sentences The *eel is on the axle and The *eel is on the orange differently—with a /wh/ sound and a /p/ sound, respectively—suggesting that speech perception is sensitive to contextual information after all.