An orthographic advantage in spoken word recognition: Behavioral and ERP evidence from cross- and within-modal priming in Korean

Spoken word recognition may benefit from orthographic information even when spelling differs from surface pronunciation. Korean Hangul preserves spelling across regular phonological changes, allowing us to compare primes matching a target’s written first syllable (orthographic, O), its realized first syllable (phonological, P), or neither (unrelated, U). We report two EEG experiments with independent participant groups, using primed auditory lexical decision on the same 120 disyllabic Korean targets, with within-modal auditory primes (Experiment 1) and cross-modal visual primes (Experiment 2). In both experiments, O primes shortened response latencies and improved accuracy relative to U primes, and produced greater behavioral benefits than P primes. The O–P latency advantage was larger with visual than auditory primes. Phonological latency priming was modest with auditory primes and was not established with visual primes, whereas evidence favored no between-experiment difference in orthographic latency priming. Orthographic relatedness was associated with more positive centro-parietal amplitudes in the N400 window (350–550 ms) in both experiments, without clear evidence of a between-experiment difference. Following visual primes, it also increased fronto-central positivity in the 250–350 ms window, more than following auditory primes. The predicted P200 enhancement was not reliably established. The behavioral O–P advantage was more clearly established than a corresponding N400 difference. The findings suggest that greater surface overlap need not yield greater facilitation and support a role for orthographic relations in spoken word recognition.