Vocabulary Learning in Modality-Specific Context: Building Complete Representations

This study seeks to determine the extent to which phonology and orthography are generated when a word is learned in a single modality (visual or auditory) and how this affects the ability to later recognize that word in the opposite modality. Participants overall required fewer trials to learn words presented visually than auditorily, and performance in a recognition and recall task indicated that the word form representations were better specified with visual training. However, slower vocabulary learners showed a deficit in their ability to accurately recognize words learned visually and later heard. Results indicate that decoding takes place more readily than encoding (used to mean the opposite of decoding) and that slow learners have difficulty forming well-specified phonological representations when given words orthographically