Effects of phonological familiarity and number of mates on homophone processing in native Japanese readers

Abstract

Lexical decision times for homophones are usually longer than are those for nonhomophones, a phenomenon known as the homophone e ect. However, experimental results regarding lexical decision times for Japanese homophones with multiple mates were inconsistent. We considered that this inconsistency could be due to the variance in the phonological familiarity regarding the homophones. Accordingly, we measured the lexical decision times for Japanese homophones with multiple mates and for those with a single mate by controlling their phonological familiarity. e results showed that homophone e ects were found for both, but the e ects for the single-mate homophones were smaller than were those for the multiple-mate homophones. Further analysis revealed that homophone e ects for multiple-mate homophones were found even when the presented homophones were the most frequent mates, unlike the ndings for English homophones. ese results suggest that both phonological familiarity and the number of mates of homophones in uence lexical decision times in native Japanese readers, and further, that in the case of multiple-mate homophones, multiple mates are activated irrespective of their frequency, which prolongs lexical decision times.

Homophone auditory processing in cross-linguistic perspective

“…Our findings of null effect, or at best a trend of advantage regarding homophone processing in Japanese, weakly echoed the reported advantage in processing multi-mate homophones (Hino et al, 2013), but challenged the findings of a disadvantage in visual processing (Tamaoka, 2007;Mizuno & Matsui, 2016). Similar to the situation in Mandarin, the existing inconsistencies regarding homophone effects in visual word processing prevents us from any conclusive argument within Japanese.…”

“…For example, while Tamaoka (2007) reported a homophone disadvantage in Japanese similar to that found in English within both visual lexical decision and word naming tasks, Hino and colleagues (2013) reported that such a disadvantage was limited to mono-mate homophones, and for homophones with more than one mate, participants, on the contrary, responded faster than they did for mono-meanings words. However, a recent study by Mizuno and Matsui (2016) challenged the findings by Hino and colleagues, showing that homophones in general had longer response latencies than monomeaning words, and multi-mate homophones had even longer latencies than single-mate homophones. Such inconsistencies also hold within Mandarin.…”

Feasibility of Estimating Concentration Level of Japanese Document Workers Based on Kana-Kanji Conversion Confirmation Time

“…Even, differences in the character type of words can differ the time required to understand by over 110ms [44]. The number of homophones also affects word judgment time by tens of milliseconds [45]. Therefore, differences in the converted character strings may have caused variations in KKCCT around tens to hundreds of milliseconds.…”