Modality-specific repetition priming of auditory word recognition

Subjects were pretrained on 30 experimental words by matching each to one of three definitions. The pretrained words were presented auditorily, or in their conventional spellings, or phonically misspelt (e.g., LORNE for lawn). The same words were later interleaved randomly with 70 new filler words and presented auditorily in a background of white noise. Only the auditory pretraining led to significantly improved recognition of the experimental words when compared with the recognition scores of a control group of subjects given no form of pretraining.