Prediction of orthographic information during listening comprehension: A printed-word visual world study

Two visual world eye-tracking experiments examined the role of orthographic information in the visual context in pre-activation of orthographic and phonological information using Japanese. Participants heard sentences that contained a predictable target word and viewed a display showing four words in a logogram, kanji (Experiment 1) or in a phonogram, hiragana (Experiment 2). The four words included either the target word (e.g., 魚 /sakana/; fish), an orthographic competitor (e.g., 角 /tuno/; horn), a phonological competitor (e.g., 桜 /sakura/; cherry blossom), or an unrelated word (e.g., 本 /hon/; book), together with three distractor words. The orthographic competitor was orthographically or phonologically dissimilar to the target in hiragana. In Experiment 1, target and orthographic competitor words attracted more fixations than unrelated words before the target word was mentioned, suggesting that participants pre-activated orthographic form of the target word. In Experiment 2, target and phonological competitor words attracted more predictive fixations than unrelated words, but orthographic competitor words did not, suggesting a critical role of the visual context. This pre-activation pattern does not fit with the pattern of lexical activation in auditory word recognition, where orthography and phonology interact. However, it is compatible with the pattern of lexical activation in spoken word production, where orthographic information is not automatically activated, in line with production-based prediction accounts.