Abstract
Lexical decision times to visually presented homophones are generally longer than those to nonhomophones, known as homophone effects. Mizuno and Matsui (2016) found homophone effects even for auditorily presented homophones, but it was unclear whether activation of visual information of their mates or activation of semantic information produced the effects. In this study, therefore, the lexical decision times to target nonhomophones were measured, with auditorily presented prime words in the following three sharing conditions of the first characters: sharing orthographic and phonological information (OP), only phonological information (P), and no information (NON) with the target words’ first characters. Mean lexical decision time in the OP condition was longer than that in the P condition, and in the P condition, lexical decision time was longer than in the NON condition. These results suggest that the phonological information of auditorily presented words activates their orthographic information.
