Abstract: The inhibitory mechanism in processing visual-auditory cross-modal and visual single-modal information during Chinese lexical processing was investigated in this study The selective recognition task was used The subjects were required to selectively process visually presented target words and simultaneously to inhibit the accompanying distractors that were semantically relevant (same category) or irrelevant (different category) to targets in experimental conditions In the control condition, the target was presented without distractor Two modalities, visual or auditory modalities, were administered to distractors Each group of stimuli was followed by one probe The subjects were asked to recognize whether the probe was one of the targets just presented in the group The inhibitory efficiency was evaluated by subtracting the response performance in control condition from that in experimental conditions The results showed that: During visual Chinese lexical processing, the'no'recognition responses in the single-modal distracting condition (visual distractors) was better than that in the cross-modal distracting condition(auditory distractors) The modality of distractors had no effect on the inhibitory efficiency in visual lexical processing The inhibitory efficiency was not significantly different between the two modalities of distractors, visual and auditory The semantic relevance of the distracting materials had influence on inhibitory efficiency The more semantic relevant (same category) to the target materials the distractors are, the more difficult they will be inhibited

Key words: single-modal, cross-modal, inhibitory mechanism, lexical processing