As the study’s procedural protocol has already been described in detail (Kayser et al., 2007), largely repeating the auditory and visual continuous word recognition memory paradigm used previously (Kayser et al., 2003), a brief summary will suffice for this report. During the serial presentation of words, participants indicated for each word whether it was new (never presented in the series) or old (presented previously) by pressing one of two buttons on a response pad. Words were 320 English nouns selected from the MRC Psycholinguistic database (Coltheart, 1981), which were presented as auditory or visual stimuli and arranged in four separate block sequences (114 trials each, 456 trials total, two auditory and two visual blocks or sequences). Ratings for word frequency (Kucera and Francis, 1967) and concreteness (Paivio et al., 1968) were balanced across blocks. There were no item repetitions either within or between modalities, except for the new-old item pairs. Item sequence and modality assignments were counterbalanced across participants.
