The role of sound and spelling in auditory word recognition: Further evidence from brain-damaged patients

This follow - up investigation explored the effects of phonological and orthographic relatedness on auditory lexical access in left - and right - hemisphere - damaged individuals. Participants listened to prime–target pairs that shared word - initial phonology (e.g., definite–deaf), initial orthography (e.g., logic–log), both initial phonology and orthography (e.g., message–mess), or were unrelated (e.g., castle– green), presented at two different inter - stimulus intervals. All groups of subjects demonstrated facilitation of lexical decision latencies due to the combined influence of both orthography and phonology, confirming earlier findings concerning rime relations. The findings are briefly discussed in relation to the neural representation of formal lexical codes.