Co-activation of phonological and orthographic codes in various modalities of language processing: A systematic and meta-analytic review

A vast amount of research has been dedicated to clarifying whether spoken word processing (listening) or production (speaking) is constrained by orthographic codes, and whether written word processing (reading) or production (writing) is constrained by phonological codes. Little work has explored what factors might modulate such cross-modal effects. In this paper, we first provided a comprehensive review of existing evidence, then conducted four meta-analyses to determine the size of cross-modal effects, and we explored potential factors that might modulate these effects. We identified robust orthographic effects on spoken word recognition (k = 93, corrected d = 0.61) and production (k = 34, corrected d = 0.44), and robust phonological effects on written word recognition (k = 178, corrected d = 0.49) and production (k = 28, corrected d = 0.35). Moderator analyses indicated that cross-modality effects may be modulated by the tasks used and by language nativeness of participants. These results shed light on our understanding of language processing.