Homophone auditory processing in cross-linguistic perspective

Abstract

Previous studies reported conflicting results for the effects of homophony on visual word processing across languages. On finding significant differences in homophone density in Japanese, Mandarin Chinese and English, we conducted two experiments to compare native speakers’ competence in homophone auditory processing across these three languages. A lexical decision task showed that the effect of homophony on word processing in Japanese was significantly less detrimental than in Mandarin and English. A word-learning task showed that native Japanese speakers were the fastest in learning novel homophones. These results suggest that language-intrinsic properties influence corresponding language processing abilities of native speakers.

A Comparative Study of Interesting Utterances in Chinese and Japanese from the Perspective of Cross-cultural Linguistics: Taking the Popular Word and Senryu (or Tik Tok Meme) in China and Japan from 2018 to 2022 as an example*

“…Youtao Lu [6](2020:529) concluded that homophonic pun features large proportion of everyday expressions in China and Japan, therefore, it is also one of the common forms of interesting utterances.…”