This special issue presents eighteen paradigms used to study spoken word recognition in experimental psycholinguistics. These range from classical paradigms such as phoneme monitoring, phonetic categorization, phoneme restoration, auditory lexical decision and word identification in noise, through well established tasks such as word monitoring, sequence syllable monitoring, gating, mispronunciation detection and various priming tasks, semantic, syntactic, morphological and form, to newer paradigms such as cued shadowing, gender decision, eye-tracking, migrations in speech recognition and word spotting. Descriptions of each paradigm take the form of summary sheets which cover a number of topics organized in a set order. Each summary sheet is followed by an extensive list of studies that have used the paradigm.