EFFECT OF UNATTENDED VISUAL AND AUDITORY WORDS ON CROSS-MODAL NAMING

Language represents a system in which distinct sensory-specific inputs converge upon a highly overlearned common correspondence. This paper examines the influence of unattended visual and auditory words upon naming latencies. Subjects were asked to name a single auditory or visual target word that occurred at the end of a meaningful aurally presented phrase. Experiment 1 indicated redundancy gains when the same word appeared on both modalities. The redundancy gains were of about the same size for both modalities. In Experiment 1 interference was found when the unattended message was visual. Experiment 2 showed that the interference effects found in the first experiment resulted mainly from a violation of the modality-specific expectancies induced by the auditory priming phrase rather than from the unattended visual item. This result suggests that expectancies created by the auditory phrase are modality specific. © 1979, The Psychonomic Soceity, Inc.. All rights reserved.