Role of stimulus modality in rating ordinary and derived word strings

Four types of word strings were presented either visually or auditorily and rated for grammaticality and meaningfulness. The string types were normal sentences, syntactically deviant strings, semantically deviant strings, and strings both syntactically and semantically deviant. Results for the auditory mode conform to expectations based upon the linguistic competence of the native speaker but results for the visual mode do not. The results are discussed in terms of the inferiority of visual over auditory short-term memory for verbal information and attentional strategies.