The effects of modality and elaboration on perceptual identification

This paper describes two experiments on the effects of spoken and written priming on perceptual identification (visual word identification in Experiment 1 and auditory word identification in Experiment 2). Much previous work that has based the priming phase on the processing of word lists suggests that cross-modal priming (auditory-visual and visual-auditory) should be relatively weak. The present studies employed script- or story-based priming and represent a development on the earlier work by Carroll and Freebody (1987). In contrast to priming by list-processing, the reported findings show that homo-modal and cross-modal priming are indistinguishable, although only when the words are congruent with the story. Modality-shift effects are found when target words are incongruent with the stories in which they are embedded at study. Results indicated that memory tests may be much more flexible with respect to the type of processing that can support performance than previous research suggests, and that the data-driven/conceptually driven distinction is not sufficient to account for the pattern of results obtained.