Tussen Lezen En Luisteren

Abstract

Two divided attention experiments investigated whether graphemes and phonemes can mutually activate each other during bimodal sublexical processing. Dutch subjects reacted to target letters and/or speech sounds in single-channel and bimodal stimuli. In some bimodal conditions, the visual and auditory targets were congruent (e.g., visual A, auditory /a:/), in others they were not (e.g., visual U, auditory /a:/). Temporal aspects of cross-modal activation were examined by varying the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of visual and auditory stimulus components. Processing differences among stimuli (e.g., the letters A and U) were accounted for by correcting the obtained bimodal reaction times by means of the predictions of an independent race-model. Comparing the results of the adapted congruent and incongruent conditions for each SOA, it can be concluded that (a) cross-modal activation takes place in this task situation; (b) it is bidirectional, i.e. it spreads from grapheme to phoneme and vice versa; and (c) it occurs very rapidly.