Semantic facilitation across sensory modalities in the processing of individual words and sentences.

The effect of semantic priming upon lexical decisions made for words in isolation (Experiment 1) and during sentence comprehension (Experiment 2) was investigated using a crossmodal lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, subjects made lexical decisions to both auditory and visual stimuli. Processing auditorily presented words facilitated subsequent lexical decisions on semantically related visual words. In Experiment 2, subjects comprehended auditorily presented sentences while simultaneously making lexical decisions for visually presented stimuli. Lexical decisions were facilitated when a visual word appeared immediately following a related word in the sentential material. Lexical decisions were also facilitated when the visual word appeared three syllables following closure of the clause containing the related material. Arguments are made for autonomy of semantic priming during sentence comprehension.