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During speech perception, a central task of the auditory cortex is to analyze complex acoustic patterns to allow detection of the words that encode a linguistic message [1]. It is generally thought that this process includes at least one intermediate, phonetic, level of representations [2–6], localized bilaterally in the superior temporal lobe [7–9]. Phonetic representations reflect a transition from acoustic to linguistic information, classifying acoustic patterns into linguistically meaningful units, which can serve as input to mechanisms that access abstract word representations [10, 11]. While recent research has identified neural signals arising from successful recognition of individual words in continuous speech [12–15], no explicit neurophysiological signal has been found demonstrating the transition from acoustic and/or phonetic to symbolic, lexical representations. Here, we report a response reflecting the incremental …