Cross-Modal Semantic Context Effects in Less Experienced and Advanced Readers

Purpose Children develop lexical orthographic expertise to recognize written words, a process involving complex visual analysis which may be vulnerable to crowding effects that impair letter identification. As oral language develops before reading, oral language comprehension may compensate for immature orthographic processing during reading development.Methods This study investigated whether oral language comprehension skills cross-modally supports visual word recognition at different stages of reading development. We examined whether congruent auditory sentences mitigated visual crowding, manipulated through decreased versus standard letter spacing, in an orthographic lexical decision task. Participants were Grade 3 (N = 47; M = 8.37 years, SD = 0.28; 57% girls) and Grade 5 (N = 45; M =10.66 years, SD = 0.33; 60% girls) readers. Results Auditory sentence contexts and visual crowding significantly affected visual word recognition latencies. Stronger auditory sentence context effects in Grade 5 were found when reaction times were z-score transformed to control for baseline differences between groups.Conclusion Evidence suggests that cross-modal interactions across levels of language processing can support visual word recognition. However, differences between transformed data (controlling for baseline group differences) and raw data highlight how analytic choices influence the direction and interpretation of developmental group differences in reading studies.