Homophone density and phonological frequencyin Chinese word recognition

摘要

The present research factorially examined the effects of homophone density,visual frequency, and phonological frequency (defined here as the cumulativefrequency of homophone mates) in Chinese visual word recognition. Stimuliwere compound characters matched in semantic and phonetic radical neigh-bourhood density and in average visual frequency of orthographic neighbours.In contrast to a previous study with Chinese by Ziegler, Tan, Perry, andMontant (2000), no facilitative effect of phonological frequency was observed.Unlike previous findings with English readers of inhibitory effects of homo-phones, a facilitative effect of homophone density restricted to low visualfrequency words – was obtained for Chinese in both lexical decision (Exp. 1) andnaming (Exp. 2), similar to Ziegler et al. (2000). Our results suggest that, whenthere is less possibility of sublexical competition between similar spellings,homophone density effects are facilitatory. This outcome supports theoreticalpositions regarding the mental representation of homophones that assume asingle representation for homophones at the phonological word form level.