BIDIRECTIONAL GRAPHEME-PHONEME ACTIVATION IN A BIMODAL DETECTION TASK

A divided attention paradigm was used to investigate whether graphemes and phonemes can mutually activate or inhibit each other during bimodal processing. In 3 experiments, Dutch subjects reacted to visual and auditory targets in single-channel or bimodal stimuli. In some bimodal conditions, the visual and auditory targets were nominally identical or redundant (e.g., visual A and auditory Absolute value of a); in others they were not (e.g., visual U and auditory Absolute value of a). Temporal aspects of cross-modal activation were examined by varying the stimulus onset asynchrony of visual and auditory stimuli. Cross-modal facilitation-but not inhibition-occurred rapidly and automatically between phoneme and grapheme representations. Implications for current models of bimodal processing and word recognition are discussed.