On the production of interlingual homophones: delayed naming and increased N400

ABSTRACTBilinguals take longer to identify interlingual homophones than control words. For example, Dutch–English bilinguals take longer to identify an English word like “leaf” ([li:f]), a homophone of the Dutch word “lief” ([lif]; meaning “sweet”), than to identify a control word like “branch”. This homophone-delay effect, observed with both visual and auditory presentation, has been interpreted as evidence in favour of language non-selective lexical access. The present article examines whether a homophone effect is also present in word production. Theoretically, homophone production may profit from feedback from a phonemic level back to a lexical level, but may suffer from a semantic conflict during a process of output monitoring. In line with the latter view, the results show (a) a delay in the production of homophones in the second language, (b) an increased error percentage in the production of homophones in both the first and second language, (c) a reduction in P200 amplitude in the production of ho...