Homophone Pairs Research Articles

Phonological phrase boundaries constrain the online syntactic analysis of spoken sentences.

Two experiments tested whether phonological phrase boundaries constrain online syntactic analysis in French. Pairs of homophones belonging to different syntactic categories (verb and adjective) were used to create sentences with a local syntactic ambiguity (e.g., [le petit chien mort], in English, the dead little dog, vs. [le petit chien] [mord], in English, the little dog bites, where brackets indicate phonological phrase boundaries). An expert speaker recorded the sentences with either a maximally informative prosody or a minimally informative one. Participants correctly assigned the appropriate syntactic category to the target word, even without any access to the lexical disambiguating information, in both a completion task (Experiment 1) and an abstract word detection task (Experiment 2). The size of the experimental effect was modulated by the prosodic manipulation (maximally vs. minimally informative), guaranteeing that prosody played a crucial role in disambiguation. The authors discuss the implications of these results for models of online speech perception and language acquisition.

The representation of homophones: More evidence from the remediation of anomia

This paper compares two theoretical positions regarding the mental representation of homophones: first, that homophones have one phonological word form but two grammatical representations (lemmas, e.g., Levelt et al., 1999; Dell, 1990), or second, that they have two separate phonological word forms (e.g., Caramazza et al., 2001). The adequacy of these two theoretical accounts for explaining the pattern of generalisation obtained in the treatment of homophone naming in aphasia is investigated. Two single cases are presented, where phonological treatment techniques are used to improve word retrieval. Treatment comprised picture naming of one member of a homophone pair using a phonological cueing hierarchy. A significant improvement in word retrieval was found for both the treated and the untreated homophones, while there was no improvement for phonologically and semantically related controls. It is argued that the data support a shared representation for homophones at the word form level. However, current theories cannot explain the pattern of generalisation found without the addition of a mechanism for repetition priming (e.g., suggested by Wheeldon and Monsell, 1992) and feedback between word form and lemmas to explain the results.

Phrasal prosody disambiguates syntax

Two experiments tested whether phonological phrase boundary cues, as produced by naïve speakers, constrain syntactic analysis in French. Pairs of homophones belonging to different syntactic categories (verb and adjective) were inserted within locally ambiguous sentences that differed in their prosodic structure (e.g., [les pommes dures]…– hard apples… – versus [les pommes] [durent…] – apples last …– where brackets indicate phonological phrase boundaries). In Experiment 1 six speakers, unaware of the ambiguities, recorded the sentences. Acoustical analyses showed that they all produced reliable prosodic cues (phrase-final lengthening and pitch rise). Experiment 2 tested whether listeners exploited these prosodic cues to constrain syntactic analysis. They listened to the sentences beginnings (cut after the ambiguous word) and completed them in writing. Their assignments of the target words to their correct syntactic categories were better than chance. We discuss these results in light of the on-going debate about the production of disambiguating prosody by speakers who are unaware of the ambiguities.

The Homophone Effect in Semantic access Tasks using Kanji Words: Its Relation to the Articulatory Suppression Effect

The present study examined whether articulatory suppression influences homophone effects in semantic access tasks using Japanese kanji words. In Experiment 1, participants were required to decide whether visually presented word pairs were synonyms. This experiment replicated the homophone effect observed in previous research that showed more false positive errors in response to nonsynonym homophone pairs than to controls. The present study found that this homophone effect was also obtained under an articulatory suppression condition. In Experiment 2, participants performed a semantic decision task, in which they had to judge whether a visually presented target word was an exemplar of a definition that was shown immediately before presentation of the target word. The homophone effect observed in previous studies was replicated--that is, longer response times and more false positive errors were associated with homophones of correct exemplars than with nonhomophone control words. This homophone effect was also obtained under an articulatory suppression conditions. These results suggest that the phonological processing that produces the homophone effects in semantic access tasks using Japanese kanji words does not include articulatory mechanisms.

Second occurrence focus and the acoustics of prominence

Partee (1991) challenged the significance of the observation that certain adverbs (e.g., only) reliably associate with phonologically prominent words to truth-conditional effect, noting second occurrence (i.e., repeated or given) focus (SOF) appears to lack a phonological realization. Rooth (1996), Bartels (2004), Beaver et al. (2004), Jaeger (2004), and Fry and Ishihara (2005) argued that, while not intonationally prominent, an SOF word can be marked by increased duration and/or increased rms intensity. An acoustic study of verb-noun homophone pairs is reported. Three sophisticated speakers uttered five repetitions of the targets, embedded in discourses, in first occurrence (FOF), SOF, and unfocused (NF) contexts, both pre- and postnuclearly. Syntagmatic comparison shows a durational effect for focus and ordering in the FOF/NF case, yet only an effect of ordering in SOF/NF; similarly, an effect of spectral balance (H1-H3) was found for FOF/NF but none for SOF/NF. Results suggest, contrary to previous assumptions, that simple durational difference is not a straightforward cue of prominence. Sluijter and van Heuven (1996) and Campbell and Beckman (1997) have shown spectral balance calculated by various means is a cue to focus; its absence in these data raises doubts that prominence is reliably produced (let alone perceived) on SOF words.

Lexical frequency effects and phonetic duration of English homophones: An acoustic study

Some current views of phonology assume a single abstract representation for each lexical item, while others assume extensive encoding of fine-grained detail. Some proponents of the latter view have claimed that differences in lexical (token) frequency are manifested as differences in phonetic duration. This claim was investigated in three experiments measuring the phonetic durations of heterographic pairs of homophonous English nouns differing in token frequency. Homophonous pairs were grouped according to magnitude of frequency difference within pairs: large difference (time ∼ thyme), medium difference (pain ∼ pane), and no difference (son ∼ sun). Four participants read (a) words in a list in a frame sentence; (b) target items in composed sentences; and (c) pairs in contrast. No systematic differences of ratio of duration (more frequent/less frequent) were found for individual speakers or across speakers in (a) or (b). Preliminary results for (c) show differences in duration correlated with contrastive focus and final lengthening, but not lexical frequency. The lack of positive correlation between duration and frequency calls into question the hypothesis that greater frequency leads to shorter duration, and underlines the need for a better understanding of the locus of frequency effects in the lexicon and speech production.

“Pray or Prey?” Dissociation of Semantic Memory Retrieval from Episodic Memory Processes Using Positron Emission Tomography and a Novel Homophone Task

One problem in studying the neural basis of semantic memory using functional neuroimaging is that it is often difficult to disentangle activation associated with semantic memory retrieval from that associated with episodic memory encoding and retrieval. To address this issue, a novel homophone task was used in which subjects were PET scanned whilst learning a series of real words (e.g., prey). In a subsequent scan, the subjects were presented with homophone pairs (e.g., prey vs pray) and were required to choose the one that had been shown previously. In two corresponding baseline tasks, the subjects were scanned whilst learning and recognizing pronounceable nonwords. Thus, while all of these tasks recruited either episodic memory encoding or retrieval processes, only the homophone tasks involved semantic memory retrieval. A conjunction analysis designed to isolate activation associated with semantic memory retrieval, revealed changes in several left lateral frontal regions (BA 9/10, 9/45), the left middle temporal cortex (BA 21), and in the left inferior temporoparietal cortex (BA 39). In contrast, a conjunction analysis designed to isolate activation associated with episodic memory encoding, revealed significant changes in the left hippocampus, as well as in the frontopolar cortex (BA 10) bilaterally, the left inferior parietal cortex (BA 40), and the left superior temporal gyrus (BA 22, 28). The present results clarify and extend recent attempts to understand the neural basis of semantic memory retrieval, by actively controlling for the confounding effects of episodic memory encoding and retrieval processes.

Distinctive functional load of pitch-accent in Japanese based on word familiarity

The present paper proposes to measure the ‘‘functional load of pitch-accent’’ for Japanese words. It is calculated from (1) the ratio of the number of accentually contrastive homophone pairs to the number of noncontrastive pairs; and (2) the difference between word-familiarity ratings for each pair. The functional load is larger when there are more contrastive homophones to noncontrastive homophones for the target word, and when the difference of word familiarity scores is smaller between each homophone pair. A large scale word-familiarity database is used for the calculation of functional load and other statistical properties of pitch accent. Distribution of accent and opposition types at each word length are investigated with respect to familiarity scores. Results show that oppositions which include an unaccented form dominate in short simplex words, from low to high-familiarity range. This suggests that the role of pitch accent in distinguishing homophones is biased to the presence–absence contrast, and not to the location per se of pitch accent. Preliminary results from a perception experiment suggest that top-down information in the lexicon, such as functional load and distribution of accent and opposition types, interacts with the bottom-up process in lexical access.

Homophone Dominance Modulates the Phonemic-Masking Effect

Four experiments tested whether homophone dominance modulates the phonemic-masking effect. Dominance was estimated by the relative frequency of homophone pairs. Positive phonemic-masking effects occurred for dominant homophones, and null phonemic-masking effects occurred for subordinate homophones. Also, subordinate homophones were much more likely to be falsely identified as their dominant mate. The source of these null phonemic-masking effects was traced to a competition between the homophone's spelling mediated by their common phonology-a null phonemic-masking effect that is itself a phonology effect. These findings converge with a growing body of phonology effects produced under conditions thought to prejudice word perception against phonology. Phonology, thus, appears to supply mandatory constraints in the perception of printed words.

Exposure to print and word recognition processes.

The effect of exposure to print on the efficiency of phonological and orthographic word recognition processes was examined by comparing two groups of university students having similar reading comprehension scores but different levels of exposure to print. Participants with a high level of exposure to print were faster and more accurate in naming pseudowords, in choosing the correct member of a homophone pair, and in making lexical decisions when nonwords were pseudohomophones. In the lexical decision task, low-print-exposure participants were more sensitive to the frequency of the orthographic patterns in the stimuli. The results of a form priming task demonstrated that high-print-exposure participants more quickly and strongly activated the orthographic representations of common words and subsequently more strongly activated the corresponding phonological representations. Even among successful students, differences in exposure to print produce large differences in the efficiency of both orthographic and phonological word recognition processes.

Automatic activation of phonological information in reading: evidence from the semantic relatedness decision task.

A semantic relatedness decision task was used to investigate whether phonological recording occurs automatically and whether it mediates lexical access in visual word recognition and reading. In this task, subjects read a pair of words and decided whether they were related or unrelated in meaning. In Experiment 1, unrelated word-homophone pairs (e.g., LION-BARE) and their visual controls (e.g., LION-BEAN) as well as related word pairs (e.g., FISH-NET) were presented. Homophone pairs were more likely to be judged as related or more slowly rejected as unrelated than their control pairs, suggesting phonological access of word meanings. In Experiment 2, word-pseudohomophone pairs (e.g., TABLE-CHARE) and their visual controls (e.g., TABLE-CHARK) as well as related and unrelated word pairs were presented. Pseudohomophone pairs were more likely to be judged as related or more slowly rejected as unrelated than their control pairs, again suggesting automatic phonological recording in reading.

Subjective familiarity of English word/name homophones

The subjective familiarity of 40 homophone pairs was examined. The homophones consisted of monosyllabic English words (on one reading) and male first names (on the other)—for example,art andArt. Subjects heard these homophones embedded in two kinds of lists, one with 40 unambiguous words and one with 40 unambiguous names. Ratings were made for familiarity as words and as names. These correlated significantly with the log of printed frequency (.63 for words, .53 for names). In a final task, just the homophones were presented, and the subjects were asked for a comparative rating of whether the word usage or the name usage was more familiar. This direct comparison correlated well (.91) with the difference between the ratings for the name and word familiarities, but less well (.55) with the differences between the printed frequencies of the word and name meanings. This indicates either consistent biases in the judgments or true differences between printed frequencies and subjective familiarity.

A cognitive and electrophysiological investigation of dyslexia

With the event-related potential (ERP) technique, we examined the time course of phonological and semantic activation in Chinese word recognition. Participants did a semantic judgment task and a homophone judgment task over the same set of word pairs. Each pair was of either high or low word frequency and the two words were either unrelated or related semantically or phonologically, i.e., being homophones. For high-frequency words, both the semantically related pairs in the homophone task and the homophonic pairs in the semantic task elicited ERP responses different from the unrelated control pairs in the N400 component but not any component earlier, suggesting a similar time course for semantic and phonological activation. For low-frequency words, the semantically related pairs in the homophone task were associated with a similar modulation of N400. However, compared to the unrelated controls, the homophonic pairs in the semantic task elicited a larger P200, a component implicated in phonological processing in the literature, and thus demonstrated a phonological activation earlier than semantic activation. The results showed that word frequency affects the time course of semantic and phonological activation suggesting that phonology is not invariably activated before semantics in Chinese word recognition.

Visual and phonological codes in repetition blindness.

Repetition blindness (RB) is the inability to detect or recall a repeated word in rapid serial visual presentation. The role of visual versus phonological (name) similarity in RB was examined. RB was found for single letters, whether printed in the same or different cases, and for single digits, whether represented verbally (nine), as arabic numerals (9), or in a mixture of the 2 formats. Hence, visual similarity is not necessary to produce RB. RB was obtained between homophonic pairs (won/one), showing that phonological similarity is sufficient to produce RB, although visual identity also contributes to RB. It is proposed that RB results when the codes used for initial registration of the targets in short-term memory are similar. This initial code may be predominantly visual or predominantly phonological.

Visual and phonological codes in repetition blindness.

Repetition blindness (RB) is the inability to detect or recall a repeated word in rapid serial visual presentation. The role of visual versus phonological (name) similarity in RB was examined. RB was found for single letters, whether printed in the same or different cases, and for single digits, whether represented verbally (nine), as arabic numerals (9), or in a mixture of the 2 formats. Hence, visual similarity is not necessary to produce RB. RB was obtained between homophonic pairs (won/one), showing that phonological similarity is sufficient to produce RB, although visual identity also contributes to RB. It is proposed that RB results when the codes used for initial registration of the targets in short-term memory are similar. This initial code may be predominantly visual or predominantly phonological.

Lexical priming deficits as a function of age.

The effects of age on implicit memory were assessed in elderly young adults using 2 priming procedures. Subjects also completed the WAIS-R, 3 tests to assess frontal lobe function, and 2 recall and 2 recognition tests of explicit memory. In Experiment 1, subjects were exposed to the low-frequency member of a homophone pair in a test purported to assess general knowledge. Subsequently, subjects completed a spelling test that contained the previously presented homophones to assess priming. Young subjects demonstrated priming (p less than .01). Elderly subjects demonstrated a high baseline that may have obscured priming. In Experiment 2, subjects from each decade of life from the 20s through the 80s were given a word-stem completion test of priming. All age conditions demonstrated an effect of priming (p less than .01). However, subjects in their 70s and 80s demonstrated lower priming scores (p less than .05). Elderly subjects were also impaired on immediate-and delayed-recall tests. These results suggest an age-related decline in both implicit and explicit memory.

Processing level and recognition: a search method for inducing alternative encodings of unrelated words.

Twenty-four subjects viewed cards containing four words. In synonym orienting, half of the cards contained a synonym pair and half did not; in homophone orienting, half of the displays contained a homophone pair. The remaining two words in each display were used to index retention. During presentation of displays, subjects responded “yes” or “no” to indicate the presence or absence of a matching pair. Following presentation, a recognition test was administered. Half the items were tested early and half were tested late; within each test order, half the items appeared with context cues during testing and half appeared without. Results showed superior recognition (1) following semantic orienting, (2) for items tested early, (3) for items tested with context, and (4) for nonmatch displays requiring exhaustive item comparison. An Orienting by Test Cuing interaction showed that the presence of test cues improved recognition for homophone orienting items only. The interaction may have resulted from the lack of cuetarget associations and the reinstatement of the phonemic orienting set during the test.

Phonological recoding and lexical access

Four experiments are reported that examine the effects of homophony (e.g., SAIL/SALE) on response latency in a lexical decision task. The results indicated that an effect of homophony was evident only if the nonword distractors consisted of legal, pronounceable strings (e.g., SLINT), but that this effect disappeared if the nonwords sounded like English words (e.g., BRANE). An optional encoding strategy is proposed to account for this differential effect. It is suggested that while both graphemic and phonemic encoding occurred simultaneously, naive subjects tended to rely on the outcome of the phonological route. However, when such reliance produced a high error rate (i.e., when the nonwords sounded like English words),. these subjects were able to abandon a phonological strategy and rely on the graphemic encoding procedure instead. Two further aspects of the results are of interest. First, the less frequent member of a homophone pair was slower when compared with a control item if the nonword distractors were of the SLINT type, but not different if they were of the BRANE type. The high-frequency members did not differ from their controls in either nonword environment. Second, in a homophone “repetition” experiment, the frequency order of presentation within pairs of homophones (i.e., the high-frequency member followed by the low-frequency member, or vice versa) had a substantial effect. A spelling recheck procedure and a response-inhibitory mechanism are postulated to incorporate these effects into a dual-encoding direct-access model of word recognition.

Sound and Meaning Correlates of Word Preferences.

Two studies were reported which are relevant to the question of whether the sound of a word contributes to its esthetic effect in poetry independently of its meaning or associations. In Experiment I each of four groups of subjects ranked one of two lists of words for beauty of meaning or beauty of sound. The words in the two lists were homophone pairs (e.g., Sun-Son). Sound preferences were not significantly correlated across lists even though the sounds judged were identical in each. However, meaning and sound preferences were highly and significantly correlated within each list. Interjudge agreement was very high for meaning but not for sound preferences. In Experiment II sound preferences for German words of unknown meaning were found to be highly correlated with meaning preferences for their English associations. These results do not support the hypothesis that sound has an independent esthetic effect, although they are not conclusive evidence against it.

Short-term memory processes in the deaf.

Two experiments are reported. In the first, profoundly deaf schoolboys read consonant sequences for immediate written recall, reading, according to instruction, either silently or aloud. Detailed error analysis suggested a dichotomous classification of subjects into those primarily relying on artioulatory coding (A group) and those relying on some other mediating code which could depend on shape (non‐A group). This classification correlated significantly with teachers' ratings of speech quality.The A group showed no effect of reading mode on total number of errors. But the non‐A group were significantly worse when reading aloud. Errors were distributed across serial positions effectively identically, regardless both of coding behaviour and reading mode. A recency effect was found of an order somewhere between that for hearing subjects reading this kind of material silently and reading it aloud.A test of the reliability of the classification into A group and non‐A group was made in the second experiment. In this the same subjects silently read word lists for immediate written recall. Lists were drawn from one of two vocabularies: one consisting of five pairs of common homophones, the other of five pairs of common words assumed to look similar. The A group recalled significantly more words of the latter lists, while the non‐A group recalled both lists equally well.The results are discussed in relation to current models for short‐term memory and to their implications for the education of the deaf. In the former connexion, the presence of recency with subjects who have no auditory feedback would be an embarrassment to ‘echo‐box’‐type accounts of recall. With respect to the latter, two main points are made: (1) Deaf school children do not all memorize in the same code, and for some it may be different from that used by teachers. (2) If memorizing names of things is impaired by reciting them aloud, a hitherto concealed weakness of a common instructional procedure is exposed.