A rose by any other name is not the same: The role of orthographic knowledge in homophone confusion errors

Homophone confusion errors were examined in a series of 6 experiments. Acro ss a variety of tasks, readers consistently made more errors on homophone t rials than on control trials. These effects were established in Experiment 1 using a semantic-decision task in which participants judged whether pairs of words were related or unrelated. For both related and unrelated trials, error rates were higher for homophones as compared with controls. Results such as these have previously been taken as evidence for the role of phonol ogy in lexical access and reading. However, differences in orthographic kno wledge (more specifically, knowledge of spelling-to-meaning correspondences ) across participants and homophone items significantly predicted homophone errors across all tasks. In addition, spelling tasks and multiple-choice q uestionnaires revealed differences in orthographic knowledge across partici pants and homophone items. Although these results do not rule out a role fo r phonology in lexical access, they indicate that homophone confusion error s may also be due to factors other than phonology.