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Description: Although infants acquire language with relative ease compared to adults, adults have the additional benefit of literacy in learning new languages. Most studies support the important role of reading in second language learning but have done so by examining words that are already familiar to the reader or become familiar over the course of the experiment. Here we ask what the independent contribution of reading and listening is to learning, in the absence of semantic information. In a first experiment, participants read sentences in an artificial language. They then listened to audio recordings of sentences containing some words previously read. ERPs time-locked to the auditory presentation of critical words suggests that participants recognized word-forms of previously read words. In the second experiment, participants first listened to audio recordings of the artificial language. They then read sentences containing some words previously heard, and showed similar sensitivity to repeated words. Thus, minimal exposure to language through silent reading and listening allowed participants to phonologically and orthographically encode and subsequently recognize new words in a different modality. Results mimic a similar pattern found in infant language learning, suggestive of a common learning mechanism that continues into adulthood, supporting an instance-based word learning framework.