The purpose of the present study was to examine pseudo-homophone effect in a sentence verification task in which sentences included a two-kanji compound nonword in the case that the target was identified by an underline. In a sentence verification task, participants asked to judge whether the presented sentence was acceptable or not. Previous studies showed that participants responded more quickly when sentences included a pseudo-homophone than when they included a non-homophonic nonword. However, participants responded more slowly to pseudo-homophones than to non-homophonic nonwords when a context of the sentence (a sentence without a target) was presented first, and a target followed which required judgment. The current experiment showed that participants responded more quickly when sentences included a pseudo-homophone, even if an underline was added at the target. Thus, the pseudo-homophone facilitation effect was observed even when the participant did not need to search where a target was. The result suggested that the main factor of the pseudo-homophone facilitation effect would be simultaneous processing of the target stimuli and sentence meaning.
