BASE-WORD FREQUENCY AND PSEUDOHOMOPHONE NAMING

The advantage of naming pseudohomophones over non-pseudohomophones has been interpreted as reflecting the contribution of whole-word lexical representations in phonological coding. A whole-word interpretation w as further supported by Taft and Russell (1992), who reported a pseudo homophone frequency effect such that pseudohomophones were named faste r if they corresponded to high- than to low-frequency base-words (e.g. poast vs. hoast). Experiment 1 replicated this pseudohomophone freque ncy effect using the Taft and Russell items. Further analyses showed, however, that the pseudohomophones in Taft and Russell's high-frequenc y group were more orthographically similar to words than the pseudohom ophones in the low-frequency group. These differences in orthography m ay have been the cause of the ''frequency'' effects. In Experiment 2, a new set of high- and low-frequency pseudohomophones was constructed that were matched on orthographic factors (i.e. SPBF and N). With thes e items, a standard pseudohomophone advantage was found such that pseu dohomophones were named faster and more accurately than non-pseudohomo phones. However, in contrast to Taft and Russell's results, pseudohomo phone naming was not related to base-word frequency. We conclude that the pseudohomophone advantage occurs at a postlexical stage in non-wor d naming.