This study reveals the relation between surprisal, phonetic distance, and latency based on a multilingual, short-term priming framework. Four Slavic languages (Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, and Russian) are investigated across two priming conditions: associative and phonetic priming, involving true cognates and near-homophones, respectively. This research is grounded in the methodology of information theory and proposes new methods for quantifying differences between meaningful lexical primes and

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... rgets for closely related languages. It also outlines the influence of phonetic distance between cognate and noncognate pairs of primes and targets on response times in a crosslingual lexical decision task. The experimental results show that phonetic distance moderates response times only in Polish and Czech, whereas the surprisal-based correspondence effect is an accurate predictor of latency for all tested languages. The information-theoretic approach of quantifying feature-based alternations between Slavic cognates and near-homophones appears to be a valid method for latency moderation in the auditory modality. The outcomes of this study suggest that the surprisal-based (un)expectedness of spoken stimuli is an accurate predictor of human performance in multilingual lexical decision tasks.