Pronunciation of homographs

Abstract

We tested the predictions concerning the pronunciation of monosyllabic homographs (words such as bass that have one regular and one irregular pronunciation) made by the dual-route model, the analogy model, and the distributed model if some level of independence between processes is assumed. In Experiment 1, we found that the naming latency of monosyllabic homographs was longer than the naming latency of regular control words that were half the printed frequency of the homographs. (We also found a longer naming latency for multisyllabic homographs that differed in both stress assignment and phonemic composition (e.g., project) compared to control words, but no difference in naming latency for multisyllabic homographs that differed only in stress assignment (e.g., insult)). In addition, we found that the more frequent pronunciation was the irregular pronunciation for the majority of the monosyllabic homographs, and the naming latency for the more frequent pronunciation for these homographs was the same as or longer than the naming latency for the less frequent pronunciation. In Experiment 2, we carried out a delayed naming control experiment and did not find any naming latency differences between homographs and controls. In Experiment 3, we compared homographs with exceptions matched in frequency and found that the naming latency difference between homographs and their controls was larger than that between exceptions and their controls. Thus, the longer naming latency for monosyllabic homographs found in Experiment 1 is not simply a production effect or an exception effect. Finally, in Experiment 4, we found that for all three classes of homographs, the proportion of a given pronunciation was highly correlated with the subjective familiarity of that pronunciation. In the discussion, we argue that these results can only be supported by naming models in which the entire input string dominates sublexical constraints. Moreover, we argue that the counterintuitive data in which the more frequent pronunciation has a longer latency than the less frequent pronunciation requires two different constraints or processes that have different time courses.