Homophone effects in visual word recognition depend on homophone type and task demands

This experiment examined how the characteristics of homophones and their mates influence homophone effects, as a function of task demands. Two types of homephones were presented: 1) low-frequency homophones with higher-frequency mates that are not animal names (e.g., maid - made), and 2) low-frequency homophones with mates that are, on average, of equivalent frequency and are animal names (e.g., foul - fowl). We observed a double dissociation: In the lexical decision task (LDT), there was a homophone effect for the first type of homophones but not for the second, whereas in the semantic categorization task (SCT) the opposite was true. These results suggest that in these tasks the effects of homophony arise when the homophone's mate creates competition in terms of the type of processing emphasized in the task, namely, orthographic processing in the LDT and semantic processing in the SCT.