Wawk on the wild side: Pseudohomophone processing revisited

The pseudohomophone effect refers to an established finding whereby in a visual lexical decision task, non-word letter strings that are pronounced like real words (e.g., WAWK) are harder to reject than pronounceable non-word strings that are non-homophonic to real words (e.g., FLIS). This paper reports two lexical decision experiments that aimed at further exploring the underlying processing mechanisms. We compared pseudohomophones like WAWK with unpronounceable non-words like NRUG and pronounceable non-words like FLIS, and made sure that all stimuli (including real-word decoys) were carefully matched in length, bigram frequency, and number of orthographic neighbours. As a consequence of this matching, the real-word decoys were from a considerably lower lexical frequency band than the base words of the pseudohomophone stimuli. Experiment 1 employed a standard lexical decision task, whereas Experiment 2 used the 2AFC eye-tracking paradigm originally developed in Kunert & Scheepers (2014). Through non-linear modelling, the latter allowed for a more fine-grained time course analysis of stimulus processing per trial. Both experiments converged on showing a reversal of the classical pseudohomophone effect. While unpronounceable strings like NRUG were correctly rejected relatively quickly, pseudohomophone strings like WAWK were indeed easier to reject than pronounceable non-word strings like FLIS. We propose that the direction of the pseudohomophone effect may depend on the overall material context, i.e., whether non-word strings are tested against the background of relatively high- or relatively low-frequency word decoys.