Homophone density and phonological frequency in Chinese word recognition

Abstract

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

Keywords:

• Homophone density
• Phonological frequency
• Chinese word recognition
• Universal phonology principle
• Cross-linguistic approach

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by a Graduate Stipendiary Research Fellowship awarded to Hsin-Chin Chen by the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&M. A preliminary report was presented at the 2004 International Conference on the Mental Lexicon, University of Windsor, Canada. We especially thank Ju-Hui Yu, Hsuan-Yi Lee, and Si-Cyun Yang for their help in conducting the experiments. We are grateful to J. Ziegler and anonymous reviewers for comments on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Notes

¹Many Chinese characters are formed by combining different radicals. For example, the character (pronounced as /shiang4/, where the number denotes the tone, and means oak), is produced by combining a semantic radical (pronounced as /mu4/, and means wood), and a phonetic radical (pronounced as /shiang4/, and means elephant).