Cross-modal repetition priming of heterographic homophones

In two cross-modal priming experiments in French, we investigated the effec ts of auditorily presented heterographic homophones (an English example is /meid/) on the subsequent visual recognition of the dominant (MADE) and sub ordinate (MAID) printed forms. When only pronounceable, regular nonwords we re used as distracter items in the lexical decision task, both dominant and subordinate forms were facilitated by the homophone prime relative to an u nrelated word prime. When pseudohomophones were added among the nonword dis tracters, dominant targets continued to show facilitation while subordinate targets showed an inhibitory trend. These results provide evidence for inh ibition-based selection in the processing of ambiguous words in the absence of any biasing context.