Phonology and Orthography in Visual Word Recognition: Effects of Masked Homophone Primes

Three lexical decision experiments and one perceptual identification experiment investigated the effects of briefly presented forward-masked homophone primes on target recognition. When primes are the more frequent homophone of target words (e.g., real-REEL) then facilitation is observed relative to unrelated controls. This contrasts sharply with the inhibitory effects of more frequent orthographic primes (e.g., ride-RITE) observed in the same experimental conditions. However, the facilitation obtained with homophone primes turns to inhibition in the presence of pseudohomophone foils in the lexical decision task. Some tentative interpretations of these results are discussed.