The homophone effect in semantic access tasks using kanji words: Its relation to the articulatory suppression effect

Abstract

The present study examined whether articulatory suppression influences homophone effects in semantic access tasks using Japanese kanji words. In Experiment 1, participants were required to decide whether visually presented word pairs were synonyms. This experiment replicated the homophone effect observed in previous research that showed more false positive errors in response to nonsynonym homophone pairs than to controls. The present study found that this homophone effect was also obtained under an articulatory suppression condition. In Experiment 2, participants performed a semantic decision task, in which they had to judge whether a visually presented target word was an exemplar of a definition that was shown immediately before presentation of the target word. The homophone effect observed in previous studies was replicated—that is, longer response times and more false positive errors were associated with homophones of correct exemplars than with nonhomophone control words. This homophone effect was also obtained under an articulatory suppression conditions. These results suggest that the phonological processing that produces the homophone effects in semantic access tasks using Japanese kanji words does not include articulatory mechanisms.

This research was supported by the 21st Century COE program (D-2 to Kyoto University), MEXT, Japan.

Notes

¹ Kanji has some specific characteristics. First, it has phonetic and semantic values, whereas kana represents phonological units. Second, because Japanese speakers use about 3,000 kanji characters in daily life (National Language Research Institute, 1976), many kanji characters share the same pronunciation. Third, many kanji have two or more pronunciations (on and kun readings). These characteristics of Japanese kanji have led many researchers to claim that phonological processing is not useful for processing kanji words and, therefore, that it does not occur in kanji word recognition (e.g., Kaiho, 1975; Nomura, 1978, 1979; H. Saito, 1981).

²  We investigated whether the shared position of kanji had any influence on judgement. The mean reaction time to experimental stimuli that shared the left kanji was 814.1 ms, while that to experimental stimuli sharing the right kanji was 800.8 ms. A Homophony (homophone vs. control) × Condition of Secondary Task (silent vs. articulatory suppression) × Position (left vs. right) ANOVA was conducted on mean reaction times of orthographically similar foils. The results showed that only a main effect of homophony was significant. A main effect of position was not significant, F ₁(1, 19) = 1.09, p = .31, MSE = 11,079.44; F ₂(1, 60) = 56, p = .46, MSE = 10,885.94. The mean percentage of errors in response to the experimental stimuli that shared left kanji was 6.7 %, and that to the experimental stimuli that shared right kanji was 8.8%. An ANOVA again found a significant main effect only of homophony. A main effect of position was not significant, F ₁(1, 19) = 1.40, p = .25, MSE = 117.75; F ₂(1, 60) = 0.14, p = .71, MSE = 206.46.

³ This does not necessarily mean that our participants did not access the meaning of the exemplar in the definition. As the data from the orthographic knowledge test showed, students could “select” the correct exemplar of a definition when it was presented with a distractor word, suggesting that the correct exemplars were in an easily accessible state after presentation of the definitions.