Masked Cross-Modal Repetition Priming: An Event-Related Potential Investigation

We report three experiments that combine the masked priming paradigm with the recording of event-related potentials in order to examine the time-course of cross-modal interactions during word recognition. Visually presented masked primes preceded either visually or auditorily presented targets that were or were not the same word as the prime. Experiment 1 used the lexical decision task, and in Experiments 2 and 3 participants monitored target words for animal names. The results show a strong modulation of the N400 and an earlier ERP component (N250 ms) in within-modality (visual-visual) repetition priming, and a much weaker and later N400-like effect (400-700 ms) in the cross-modal (visual-auditory) condition with prime exposures of 50 ms (Experiments 1 & 2). With a prime duration of 67 ms (Experiment 3), cross-modal ERP priming effects arose earlier during the traditional N400 epoch (300-500 ms) and were also larger overall than at the shorter prime duration.