Lexical access codes in visual and auditory word recognition

Abstract

Lexical access takes place when sensory information is matched to lexical information. The nature of the code in which this match takes place was examined in two experiments. The first experiment looked at auditory lexical processing and found that nonwords took longer to classify as nonwords if they formed the beginnings of real words, regardless of syllable structure. This was in contrast to a second experiment which employed a visual lexical decision task, where nonwords took longer to classify only if they formed the first syllable of a word. It was concluded that the access code that activates lexical information in spoken word recognition is the first few phonemes regardless of syllable structure, whereas in printed word recognition the access code is the first (orthographically defined) syllable.