Abstract
Language users encounter words in at least two different modalities. Arguably, the most frequent encounters are in spoken or written form. Previous research has shown that – compared to the spoken modality – written language features more difficult words. An important question is whether input modality has effects on word recognition accuracy. In the present study, we investigated whether input modality (spoken, written, or bimodal) affected word recognition accuracy and whether such a modality effect interacted with word difficulty. Moreover, we tested whether the participants’ reading experience interacted with word difficulty and whether this interaction was influenced by modality. We re-analyzed data from 48 Dutch university students that were collected in the context of a vocabulary test development to assess in which modality test words should be presented. Participants carried out a word recognition task, where non-words and words of varying difficulty were presented in auditory, visual and audio-visual modalities. In addition, they completed a receptive vocabulary and an author recognition test to measure their exposure to literary texts. Our re-analyses showed that word difficulty interacted with reading experience in that frequent readers (i.e., with more exposure to written texts) were more accurate in recognizing difficult words than individuals who read less frequently. However, there was no evidence for an effect of input modality on word recognition accuracy, nor for interactions with word difficulty or reading experience. Thus, in our study, input modality did not influence word recognition accuracy. We discuss the implications of this finding and describe possibilities for future research involving other groups of participants and/or different languages.
Highlights
With the invention of reading and writing, humans gained the opportunity to use language in another modality than the spoken form
Previous studies have reported word recognition benefits for visual and bimodal modalities compared to the auditory modality using a lexical decision task (Connine et al, 1990; Lopez Zunini et al, 2020; Turner et al, 1998)
Note that these findings do not allow for generalizations on how modality affects word recognition accuracy as lexical decision tasks typically use words with a limited difficulty range such that responses are assumed to index the speed with which a lexical entry is accessed
Summary
With the invention of reading and writing, humans gained the opportunity to use language in another modality than the spoken form. Previous studies have reported word recognition benefits for visual and bimodal (simultaneous presentation of orthographic representation and spoken production of the phonological form) modalities compared to the auditory modality using a lexical decision task (Connine et al, 1990; Lopez Zunini et al, 2020; Turner et al, 1998). In the study by Ferrand et al, word frequency explained only a relatively small portion of variance in the spoken modality (7% and 13% of variance in recognition accuracy and lexical decision latencies, respectively). One reason for the strong influence of word frequency on word recognition in the visual but not auditory modality could be – as explained above – that written text contains more infrequent words than spoken language (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1998; Hayes & Ahrens, 1988). Language users are more likely to encounter less frequent words in the visual rather than the auditory modality
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