Effects of number of mates and context on the processing of Japanese homophones

Abstract

Mizuno and Matsui (2016) observed more salient homophone effects for Japanese homophones as the number of mates increased, indicating that Japanese homophones activate their multiple mates. However, as Japanese has many homophones that generally have multiple mates, their finding implies that Japanese is a language that requires considerable processing times. Given the evidence for context effects, it is possible that no homophone effects would emerge within congruous contexts because Japanese homophones should be processed smoothly, irrespective of mate numbers. The present experiment compares lexical decision times for homophones with multiple mates, for homophones with a single mate, and for nonhomophones within both congruous and incongruous contexts. In the congruous contexts, no homophone effects were observed for either of the two homophone conditions, which indicates that Japanese homophones are processed as smoothly as nonhomophones when appropriate context is provided. Finally, the paper discusses the need to investigate language processing within realistic situations.