| Six experiments were conducted to address the role of phonological information in visual word recognition. A semantic decision task was used to ensure that word meanings were accessed. Experiments 1-4 showed that subjects make more false positive errors on homophone foils (e.g. living thing-FLEE) than on spelling controls (e.g. living thing-FLEX) only when both members of the homophone pair are uncommon and are similarly spelled. In Experiment 5, there was an increase in errors on low but not high frequency homophone category exemplars when they were preceded by a word related to the other member of the homophone pair (e.g. SHATTER-BRAKE). In Experiment 6, subjects produced longer decision latencies on homophone exemplars than on semantic controls only when they were low in frequency. These results indicate that, even in skilled readers, phonological information mediates the access of meaning for low frequency words, and that orthographic activation also contributes to the activation of their meanings. |
