Semantic mediation of auditory priming in dyslexia

Dyslexics are facilitated in forced choice visual lexical decision if they simultaneously hear the target word (identity priming). In two experiments we tested the possibility that orthographic activation by phonology is semantically mediated. In the first experiment a dyslexic was facilitated as much by hearing a word semantically associated to the target word (BLUE/sky) as he had been previously by identity priming (GOES/goes). In the second experiment we found that auditory identity priming produced greater facilitation for content words than for function words. Orthographic activation by phonology is at least partly mediated by semantics.