Wawk on the wild side: Context-dependence of pseudohomophone processing

The pseudohomophone effect refers to an established finding whereby in a visual lexical decision task, non-word letter strings that are pronounced like real words (e.g., WAWK) are harder to reject than non-word strings that are not pronounced like real words (e.g., FLIS). This paper reports three lexical decision experiments that aimed at further exploring the underlying processing mechanisms. In Experiment 1 and 2, we compared pseudohomophones like WAWK with unpronounceable non-words like NRUG and pronounceable non-words like FLIS, making sure that all stimuli (including real-word fillers) were carefully matched in length, bigram frequency, and number of orthographic neighbours. Matching stimuli in this way resulted in the real-word fillers to be of low lexical frequency (lower than for the pseudohomophones’ base words). Experiment 1 employed a standard lexical decision task, whereas Experiment 2 used the 2AFC eye-tracking paradigm originally developed in Kunert & Scheepers (2014). Both experiments converged on showing a reversal of the classical pseudohomophone effect: while unpronounceable strings like NRUG were correctly rejected relatively quickly, pseudohomophones like WAWK were indeed easier to reject than pronounceable non-words like FLIS. Our final Experiment 3, by contrast, confirmed a ‘classical’ pseudohomophone effect when the same non-word stimuli were tested against high- rather than low frequency words as fillers. We conclude that the direction of the pseudohomophone effect strongly depends on the overall material context.