PHONOLOGY AND ORTHOGRAPHY IN VISUAL WORD RECOGNITION - EFFECTS OF MASKED HOMOPHONE PRIMES

Three lexical decision experiments and one perceptual identification e xperiment investigated the effects of briefly presented forward-masked homophone primes on target recognition. When primes are the more freq uent homophone of target words (e.g., real-REEL) then facilitation is observed relative to unrelated controls. This contrasts sharply with t he inhibitory effects of more frequent orthographic primes (e.g., ride -RITE) observed in the same experimental conditions. However, the faci litation obtained with homophone primes turns to inhibition in the pre sence of pseudohomophone foils in the lexical decision task. Some tent ative interpretations of these results are discussed. (C) 1994 Academi c Press, Inc.