Research in the cognitive and neural sciences has long posited a distinction between the long-term memory (LTM) storage of information and the short-term buffering of information that is being actively manipulated in working memory (WM). This basic type of distinction has been posited in a variety of domains, including written language production—spelling. In the domain of spelling, the primary source of empirical evidence regarding this distinction has been cognitive neuropsychological studies reporting deficits selectively affecting what the cognitive neuropsychological literature has referred to as the orthographic lexicon (LTM) or the graphemic buffer (WM). Recent papers have reexamined several of the hallmark characteristics of impairment affecting the graphemic buffer, with implications for our understanding of the nature of the orthographic LTM and WM systems. In this paper, we present a detailed case series study of 4 individuals with acquired spelling deficits and report evidence from both error types and factors influencing error rates that support the traditional distinction between these cognitive systems involved in spelling. In addition, we report evidence indicating possible interaction between these systems, which is consistent with a variety of recent findings in research on spelling.

Talker intelligibility and perceptual adaptation under cochlear implant ͑CI͒-simulation and speech in multi-talker babble were compared. The stimuli consisted of 100 sentences produced by 20 native English talkers. The sentences were processed to simulate listening with an eight-channel CI or were mixed with multi-talker babble. Stimuli were presented to 400 listeners in a sentence transcription task ͑200 listeners in each condition͒. Perceptual adaptation was measured for each talker by comparing intelligibility in the first 20 sentences of the experiment to intelligibility in the last 20 sentences. Perceptual adaptation patterns were also compared across the two degradation conditions by comparing performance in blocks of ten sentences. The most intelligible talkers under CI-simulation also tended to be the most intelligible talkers in multi-talker babble. Furthermore, listeners demonstrated a greater degree of perceptual adaptation in the CI-simulation condition compared to the multi-talker babble condition although the extent of adaptation varied widely across talkers. Listeners reached asymptote later in the experiment in the CI-simulation condition compared with the multi-talker babble condition. Overall, these two forms of degradation did not differ in their effect on talker intelligibility, although they did result in differences in the amount and time-course of perceptual adaptation.

Visual speech perception has become a topic of considerable interest to speech researchers. Previous research has demonstrated that perceivers neurally encode and use speech information from the visual modality, and this information has been found to facilitate spoken word recognition in tasks such as lexical decision (Kim, Davis, & Krins, 2004). In this paper, we used a cross-modality repetition priming paradigm with visual speech lexical primes and auditory lexical targets to explore the nature of this priming effect. First, we report that participants identified spoken words mixed with noise more accurately when the words were preceded by a visual speech prime of the same word compared with a control condition. Second, analyses of the responses indicated that both correct and incorrect responses were constrained by the visual speech information in the prime. These complementary results suggest that the visual speech primes have an effect on lexical access by increasing the likelihood that words with certain phonetic properties are selected. Third, we found that the cross-modality repetition priming effect was maintained even when visual and auditory signals came from different speakers, and thus different instances of the same lexical item. We discuss implications of these results for current theories of speech perception.