The Homophone Effect in Written French: The Case of Verb-Noun Inflection Errors

Abstract

Sometimes people miswrite a word that sounds like the target word (e.g. “there” instead of “their”). This homophone effect is interesting in that it is one of the rare cases in which grammatical classes can be violated. In five experiments, we provided evidence that the homophone effect can be experimentally induced in French adults. This effect manifested itself through the occurrence of noun-verb inflection errors. These inflection errors were elicited by presenting subjects with “pronoun1 pronoun2 verb” sentences and asking them to recall these sentences by writing them down. In these sentences, when the verb had a noun homophone whose frequency was higher than that of the verb, the erroneous inflection was most often -s, the plural mark of nouns. The first three experiments showed that this homophone effect was enhanced when working memory was overloaded. The last two experiments showed that the homophone effect increased when the meaning of the noun was primed by a relevant semantic context. The present findings are interpreted in the framework of an activation model.