The KEY to the ROCK: Near-homophony in nonnative visual word recognition

Abstract

To test the hypothesis that native language (L1) phonology can affect the lexical representations of nonnative words, a visual semantic-relatedness decision task in English was given to native speakers and nonnative speakers whose L1 was Japanese or Arabic. In the critical conditions, the word pair contained a homophone or near-homophone of a semantically associated word, where a near-homophone was defined as a phonological neighbor involving a contrast absent in the speaker’s L1 (e.g., ROCK–LOCK for native speakers of Japanese). In all participant groups, homophones elicited more false positive errors and slower processing than spelling controls. In the Japanese and Arabic groups, near-homophones also induced relatively more false positives and slower processing. The results show that, even when auditory perception is not involved, recognition of nonnative words and, by implication, their lexical representations are affected by the L1 phonology.

1 Description

The data contains only trials from the Japanese participants.

Subject

Participant ID.

Procedure

Whether the trial is a practice (PracticeProc) of a test trial (TrialProc).

Version

Trial version.

Contrast

Type of contrast (F filler, H homophone, LR /l~r/, P phonological, PB /p~b/).

Item

Item number.

Condition

Trial condition (whether the pair contains Control, Related, or Unrelated words),

WordL

Word shown on the left-side of the screen.

WordR

Word shown on the right-side of the screen.

Words.ACC

Whether the participant correctly identified the pair being related or unrelated.

Words.RT

Reaction time of response in milliseconds.