Compensatory cross-modal effects of sentence context on visual word recognition in adults

Abstract

Reading involves mapping combinations of a learned visual code (letters) onto meaning. Previous studies have shown that when visual word recognition is challenged by visual degradation, one way to mitigate these negative effects is to provide "top-down" contextual support through a written congruent sentence context. Crowding is a naturally occurring visual phenomenon that impairs object recognition and also affects the recognition of written stimuli during reading. Thus, access to a supporting semantic context via a written text is vulnerable to the detrimental impact of crowding on letters and words. Here, we suggest that an auditory sentence context may provide an alternative source of semantic information that is not influenced by crowding, thus providing "top-down" support cross-modally. The goal of the current study was to investigate whether adult readers can cross-modally compensate for crowding in visual word recognition using an auditory sentence context. The results show a significant cross-modal interaction between the congruency of the auditory sentence context and visual crowding, suggesting that interactions can occur across multiple levels of processing and across different modalities to support reading processes. These findings highlight the need for reading models to specify in greater detail how top-down, crossmodal and interactive mechanisms may allow readers to compensate for deficiencies at early stages of visual processing.

Contributions of Listening Effort and Intelligibility to Cortical Tracking of Speech in Adverse Listening Conditions

“…For the reading assessment, participants completed 3 tasks: a text reading task, a word reading task, and a pseudoword reading task. In the first task, participants read a semantically non-meaningful text in Spanish adapted from the French test of L'Alouette (Lefavrais, 1965), which forced them to rely solely on mechanistic reading skills and prevented the use of anticipation or inference strategies that could boost their reading scores (see Clark et al, 2021). In the other two tasks, participants were asked to read as fast and accurately as possible a list of words and a list of pseudowords each containing forty-four items.…”

Lexiland: A Tablet-based Universal Screener for Reading Difficulties in the School Context

“…Fluency (Time 2 and 3). Fluency was assessed via a two-minute reading test that consisted of reading as fast and as accurately as possible a meaningless text of 278 words in 2 minutes (following Clark et al, 2021). The text was presented in paper.…”