WHEN A ROWS IS A ROSE - PHONOLOGICAL EFFECTS IN WRITTEN WORD COMPREHENSION

When skilled readers make speeded categorization judgements about prin ted words, errors occur to homophones of real category exemplars. In E xperiments 1 and 2, for example, subjects incorrectly accepted both th e word STEAL (as a member of the category A METAL) and the nonword JEA P (as A VEHICLE) significantly more often than incorrect non-homophoni c items matched in orthographic similarity to real exemplars. Experime nt 3 demonstrated equivalent error rates for homophone targets differi ng from real exemplars by various types of single-letter change, but r educed error rates, especially for non-word homophones, when subjects were instructed to accept only correctly spelled instances. Experiment s 4 and 5 established that the magnitude of the homophone effect is pr edicted by the degree of orthographic similarity between homophonic ma tes but not by spelling-sound regularity of the presented homophone. T he results suggest that automatic phonological activation plays a majo r role in the comprehension of written words.