The prime modality effect on the time course of Chinese spoken word recognition: Evidence from lexical decision task

In the present study, two experiments were carried out to investigate how the time course of spoken word recognition in Mandarin Chinese was modulated by prime modality with the unimodal auditory priming and cross-modal priming designs respectively. Spoken word primes were used in the first experiment, and written primes in the second. The phonological relation between primes and targets was manipulated, with the same disyllabic target word preceded by identical, unrelated, or cohort primes (i.e., sharing phonologically similar word-initial syllables as the targets, but with different meanings). Participants performed a lexical decision task in both experiments. An enhanced P2, indexing early phonological processing between 200 and 300 ms was elicited by word-initial phonological mismatches in the unimodal priming design, but not in the cross-modal priming design. Centro-parietal Early N400 and Late N400 effects, indexing semantic processing were elicited in both designs, but with more negative amplitude in the crossmodal design. These results demonstrate that both the phonological processing and semantic processing in Chinese spoken word recognition are modulated by the modality of the primes, but qualitatively for the former and quantitatively for the later.