The Effect of Homophone Training on Pseudohomophone Reaction Time

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The Effect of Homophone Training on Pseudohomophone Reaction Time

Abstract

The study investigated the effect of training with homophones on the

pseudohomophone effect when participants were required to search their

lexicon for a familiar letter string, this also investigated the ideas

put forward by the dual route model where orthographic and

phonological processes are both used in the analysis of word strings.

The design of the experiment was a between subjects forced choice

lexical decision task, where participants were shown two word strings

simultaneously and asked to respond as to which was a correct word.

Participants were students from the University of Nottingham split

into two different groups that were subject too different training

conditions. Stimuli were four letter single syllabale word strings

including homophones, regular words, non word strings, and

pseudohomophones as used in previous research by Underwood (1988). The

results obtained did not show a significant difference in reaction

times between the two conditions although further analysis did show

that the pseudohomophone effect was present. The study concludes that

although the results were not significant at a high confidence level

they are still positive in supporting the ideas of earlier studies

including the dual route model and the important roles of both

orthographic and phonological processes in word recognition.

Introduction

A pseudohomophone is a letter string that looks and sounds like a word

such as “Bild” (a non word that sounds like a real world, build). The

pseudohomophone effect says that it will take longer to distinguish

between a real word and a pseudohomophone than to distinguish between

a real word and a non word, such as “jate”, which is not a

pseudohomophone. Rubenstein et al (1971) presented participants with a

word that was either a non word, a pseudohomophone or a real world for

2 seconds and asked them to respond as to whether they had just seen a

real word or a non word. The results showed the pseudohomophone effect

and Rubenstein (1971) suggested that this occurrs because we use a

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