Rebounding activation caused by lexical homophony in the processing of Japanese two-kanji compound words

Abstract

The present study investigated the effects of lexical homophony on the processing of Japanese two-kanji compound words. Experiment 1 showed that participants took longer to perform lexical decisions for words with a high degree of lexical homophony than those with no homophony. Interestingly, the same inhibitory trend was found in the naming task of Experiment 2. Participants took longer to name words with a high degree of lexical homophony than those with no homophony. The consistency of an inhibitory effect through the two experiments suggests that during naming and lexical decisions for Japanese two-kanji compound words, an orthographic representation activates the phonological representation, which then leads to a rebounding activation of orthographic representations of homophonic forms.

The processing advantage and disadvantage for homophones in lexical decision tasks.

“…1 Thus, just like the processing advantage observed in the Chinese studies, a homophone advantage might be expected for kanji words. In contrast to this expectation, however, Tamaoka (2007) reported a significant homophone disadvantage in his lexical decision and naming tasks with kanji words.…”

“…However, another possibility is that there was a confound in Tamaoka's (2007) stimuli. As is described below, Tamaoka's (2007) homophones and nonhomophones were not well matched in terms of familiarity ratings; hence, it is possible that the effect observed with these stimuli may actually be a familiarity effect rather than a homophone effect.…”

Homophone auditory processing in cross-linguistic perspective

“…Our findings of null effect, or at best a trend of advantage regarding homophone processing in Japanese, weakly echoed the reported advantage in processing multi-mate homophones (Hino et al, 2013), but challenged the findings of a disadvantage in visual processing (Tamaoka, 2007;Mizuno & Matsui, 2016). Similar to the situation in Mandarin, the existing inconsistencies regarding homophone effects in visual word processing prevents us from any conclusive argument within Japanese.…”

“…Inconsistencies between findings on homophone processing have mostly come from studies that examined homophone effects in Japanese and Mandarin. For example, while Tamaoka (2007) reported a homophone disadvantage in Japanese similar to that found in English within both visual lexical decision and word naming tasks, Hino and colleagues (2013) reported that such a disadvantage was limited to mono-mate homophones, and for homophones with more than one mate, participants, on the contrary, responded faster than they did for mono-meanings words. However, a recent study by Mizuno and Matsui (2016) challenged the findings by Hino and colleagues, showing that homophones in general had longer response latencies than monomeaning words, and multi-mate homophones had even longer latencies than single-mate homophones.…”

Cross-script phonological priming with Japanese Kanji primes and English targets

“…For example, homophone effects have been observed for Kanji words in lexical decision studies (Hino, Kusunose, Lupker, & Jared, 2013;Tamaoka, 2007) and in category decision studies (Morita & Saito, 2007;Sakuma, Sasanuma, Tatsumi, & Masaki, 1998;Wydell, Patterson, & Humphreys, 1993). The evidence is mixed regarding whether phonological priming occurs when both primes and targets are in Kanji.…”