There is ever-growing evidence of a direct influence of central processing stages on the peripheral stages in language production across modalities. In other words, structural properties directly modulate the linguistic output, which mostly surfaces as variation in the output signal. Although processing stages are generally regarded as highly integrated, the mere existence of such direct influence challenges most traditional theoretical approaches, according to which central processing would be complete before the initiation of peripheral production processes, such as articulation for speaking or hand movements for both writing and signing.

For the spoken modality, we find traces of semantic transparency, morphological status, or syntactic environment in the acoustic signal (e.g., Schmitz et al. 2021). Similarly, written and signed language production have been shown to be susceptible to sublexical differences (e.g., Börstell et al. 2024; Muschalik et al. 2024). It seems there are striking parallels between the modalities, yet findings are still mostly discussed modality-specific and independently of one another. We argue that the traces of central processing we find in the cross-modal periphery can be used to shed further light on more general patterns in language processing and the intricate interplay between language modalities.

This workshop aims at taking a cross-modal perspective, highlighting similarities and differences between existing modality-specific findings, to discuss language production as a modality-spanning cognitive process. The workshop invites researchers with different areas of complementary expertise, ranging from spoken and written to signed language processing. Contributions that may build bridges between modalities and invite cross-modal comparison are particularly welcome.