Semantic and phonological influences on the processing of words and pseudohomophones

Abstract

In the area of visual word recognition, one of the most debated topics concerns the degree to which phonological codes play a role in the recognition of letter strings. As evidence that phonology does play a role in the lexical decision task, researchers have shown that nonword response latencies are longer to pseudohomophones (e.g., nale) than to orthographically matched pseudowords (e.g., nalp; Coltheart, Davelaar, Jonasson, & Besner, 1977;Fera & Besner, 1992;McCann, Besner, & Davelaar, 1988;Rubenstein, Lewis, & Rubenstein, 1971;Seidenberg, Petersen, MacDonald, & Plaut, 1996), implying that the pseudohomophone accesses the representation of its base word (e.g., nail ), and that this base word representation slows the processing of the pseudohomophone. Because the pseudohomophone effect has become central to models of word recognition (Ziegler, Jacobs, & Klüppel, 2001), it is critical that we understand fully the processes underlying the effect.It is not clear, however, exactly what properties of the base word affect processing of pseudohomophones. Two potential representations are usually implicated. The first and most obvious candidate is simply the phonological representation itself. According to this account, pseudohomophones activate the phonological representation of their base words, and because the phonological representation of a pseudohomophone perfectly matches the phonologyof an actual word, "no" latencies toward pseudohomophones are increased. Thus, on this account, it is simply the phonological form of the pseudohomophone that slows processing. This purely phonological account of the pseudohomophoneeffect is the most common ). However, another possibility is that a pseudohomophone activates the semantic representation of its base word. On this account, a pseudohomophone activates the phonological representation of its base word, which in turn activates the word's semantic representation. Thus, "no" latencies to a pseudohomophone are longer because the semantic activation associated with the base word incorrectly indicates that the pseudohomophone is a word. The difference between these two accounts is that the latter posits an extra step (i.e., from phonology to semantics).One can understand the semantic account of the pseudohomophone effect by considering a framework within which the orthographic, phonological, and semantic levels are fully interactive (see, e.g., Pexman & Lupker, 1999;Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989). In this framework, the phonological representation of a pseudohomophone activates the semantic representation of its base word because of the match between the phonology of the pseudohomophone and that of the base word. With this increased semantic activation,a pseudohomophonewill appear more wordlike, and the "no" latency will increase. Of course, these accounts of the pseudohomophone effect (i.e., the phonological and the semantic accounts) are not necessarily mutually exclusive. It is possible that the processing of pseudohomophones is affected by both factors (i.e., by both the p...

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