Pseudohomophone Effect

The ‘Pseudohomophone Effect’ in how we recognise words.

Abstract:

Have you ever come across a word that sounds like a real life word but is actually not present in the dictionary? Did something make you feel like it exists but only to find out in reality that the word only sounds like another one?

Homophones are two real words that sound like one another e.g ‘hear’ and ‘here’.

On the other hand, Pseudo-homophones are pseudo words that are phonetically identical to a word. For example, groan/grone and crane/crain are pseudo-homophone pairs, whereas plane/plain is a homophone pair since both letter strings is recognised words. Both types of pairs are used in lexical decision tasks to investigate word recognition. Phonology is, broadly speaking, the sub discipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. Orthography is the spelling of the word. The pseudohomophone effect reflects the finding that non-words with a pronunciation equal to a word (e.g., ”brane”, ”focks”) are harder to reject than regular non-words (as they resemble “brain” and “fox”).

Introduction:

Research that supports the idea that semantic features are necessary for word recognition use pseudohomophones. By using pseudohomophones ( words that sounds like real words but are not) and nonpseudohomophones (words that do not sound like real words) as stimuli in lexical decision tasks (McCann) an establishment can be made that pseudohomophones cause a base word to be accessed in lexical memory. The research carried out by McCann concluded that this pseudo effect is caused by a process which uses decoding to activate semantic codes or phonological codes.

It has also been suggested that the difficulty a subject would have pronouncing a non word would depend on the similarity it has with another word, and if the orthographic code is rare, recognition cannot occur due to there being no activation of semantic information. This therefore illustrates that cognitive processes are...