The profile of real-time competition in spoken and written word recognition: More similar than different

Word recognition occurs across two sensory modalities: auditory (spoken words) and visual (written words). While each faces different challenges, they are often described in similar terms as a competition process by which multiple lexical candidates are activated and compete for recognition. While there is a general consensus regarding the types of words that compete during spoken word recognition, there is less consensus for written word recognition. The present study develops a novel version of the Visual World Paradigm (VWP) to examine written word recognition and uses this to assess the nature of the competitor set during word recognition in both modalities using the same experimental design. For both spoken and written words, we found evidence for activation of onset competitors (cohorts, e.g., cat, cap) and words that contain the same phonemes or letters in reverse order (anadromes, e.g., cat, tack). We found no evidence of activation for rhymes (e.g., cat, hat). The results across modalities were quite similar, with the exception that for spoken words, cohorts were more active than anadromes, whereas for written words activation was similar. These results suggest a common characterisation of lexical similarity across spoken and written words: temporal or spatial order is coarsely coded, and onsets may receive more weight in both systems. However, for spoken words, temporary ambiguity during the moment of processing gives cohorts an additional boost during real-time recognition.