| Summary: | The current study explores the influence of printed words on spoken word
recognition. Theoretical frameworks outline ties between the modalities (Massaro, 1987)
and, in particular, orthography and phonology (Grainger, Diependaele, Spinelli, Ferrand,
& Farioli, 2003). This study investigated whether text can influence the resolution of
ambiguous spoken words, and whether this influence can occur when the text is displayed
below conscious awareness.
Twenty-two young adults participated in a cross-modal word repetition task (i.e.,
textual prime followed by an auditory target which was repeated). The textual primes
were either identifiable to the participants or not. The auditory targets were either
unambiguous or ambiguous (through digital editing of the voice onsets of spoken words).
The pairing of the prime and target words was also manipulated to form various priming
relationships (e.g., pan-PAN, ban-PAN, net-PAN, etc.).
The results show that text can facilitate or inhibit the processing of ambiguous
spoken words, providing some evidence of interconnectivity between orthography and
phonology. These effects appear to be limited to when the text is consciously
identifiable, suggesting that cross-modal priming is dependent on the length of exposure
of a printed word. There was also a general perceptual bias by participants to identify
(i.e., repeat) the ambiguous targets as voiced (e.g., BAN), indicating that the degree of
ambiguity was not sufficient to allow preceding text to influence the identification of
these targets. === Medicine, Faculty of === Audiology and Speech Sciences, School of === Graduate
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