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 bimod al 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 oth ers they were not (e.g., visual U and auditory Absolute value of a). T emporal 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 be tween phoneme and grapheme representations. Implications for current m odels of bimodal processing and word recognition are discussed.