Processing Homophones Interactively: Evidence from eye-movement data
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Abstract The question of how to process an ambiguous word in context has been long-studied in psycholinguistics and the present study examined this question further by investigating the spoken word recognition processes of Cantonese homophones (a common type of ambiguous word) in context. Sixty native Cantonese listeners were recruited to participate in an eye-tracking experiment. Listeners were instructed to listen carefully to a sentence ending with a Cantonese homophone and then look at different visual probes (either Chinese characters or line-drawing pictures) presented on the computer screen simultaneously. Two findings were observed. First, the results revealed that sentence context exerted an early effect on homophone processes. Second, visual probes that serve as phonological competitors only had a weak effect on the spoken word recognition processes. Consistent with previous studies, the patterns of eye-movement results appeared to support an interactive processing approach in homophone recognition.Keywords:
Homophone
Sentence processing
Six experiments explored the role of phonology in the activation of word meanings when words were embedded in meaningful texts. Specifically, the studies examined whether participants detected the substitution of a homophone mate for a contextually appropriate homophone. The frequency of the incorrect homophone, the frequency of the correct homophone, and the predictability of the correct homophone were manipulated. Also, the impact of reading skill was examined. When correct homophones were not predictable and participants had a range of reading abilities, the evidence indicated that phonology plays a role in activating the meanings of low-frequency words only. When the performance of good and poor readers was examined separately, the evidence indicated that good readers primarily activate the meanings of words using the direct route, whereas poor readers primarily activate the meanings of words using the phonological route.
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Zhongshan Wang (中山王) bronze inscription has a large number of paronyms, phonograms, homophones and dialect words, these are valuable material for phonology study in ancient times. From the point of phonology, this text investigates three respects of it separately, that is, initial consonant, simple or compound of a Chinese, vowel and tone. It reveals the actual pronunciation appearance which the material reflects, and explains those language phenomena according to strict phonology principle
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Yulin Qiaobei Dialect is a sub-dialect of Taiwanese dialect, and it is used by people in several villages in Yulin City, Guangxi.This paper specifically describes the phonology of Yulin Qiaobei dialect, including the rhyme, the tune and its characteristics, and the homophone table as well.
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▪ Abstract There are two main domains of research in psycholinguistics: sentence processing, concerned with how the syntactic structures of sentences are computed, and text processing, concerned with how the meanings of larger units of text are understood. In recent sentence processing research, a new and controversial theme is that syntactic computations may rely heavily on statistical information about the relative frequencies with which different syntactic structures occur in the language. In text processing, recent research has focused on what information the words and ideas of a text evoke from long- term memory quickly, passively, and at low processing cost. Research in both domains has begun to use the information that can be obtained from large corpora of naturally occurring texts.
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Whether prelexical phonology exists in a logographic script such as Chinese has long been debated. In contrast to English, there is no explicit grapheme-phoneme correspondence rule for Chinese characters, which makes the idea of prelexical phonology seemingly implausible. To provide a logical basis for prelexical phonology in Chinese character recognition, Chua (1999) proposed two independent routes for Chinese character recognition: one through phonology that is carried by low spatial frequencies, and the other through a lexicon that is carried by high spatial frequencies. The low frequency channels can be activated earlier than the high frequency ones, so the global shape of a character provides the phonological information even before the full identification of the character is possible. In this study, a verification paradigm using four-character idioms was adopted to test Chua's low spatial-frequency mediated phonology model. Three characters of each four-character idiom were presented first, followed by four kinds of foils designed factorially of orthography (similar, dissimilar) × homophone (yes, no). The accuracy in rejecting orthographically similar or homophonic foils was found lower than their controls when the foils were unfiltered (Experiment 1). The homophone effect was not consistently found when the foils contained only low spatial frequency information (Experiment 2); it was found when low spatial frequency information was absent (Experiment 3); and it was also found when only a middle range of spatial frequencies was intact (Experiment 4). In contrast, the orthography effect was found consistently in all 4 experiments. These results argue against the low-spatial-frequency mediated phonology.
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What Can Homophone Effects Tell Us About the Nature of Orthographic Representation in Visual Word Recognition? Jodi D. Edwards (jdedward@ucalgary.ca) Department of Linguistics, University of Calgary 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, AB, Canada T2N 1N4 Penny M. Pexman (pexman@ucalgary.ca) Department of Psychology, University of Calgary 2500 University Drive NW, Calgary, AB, Canada T2N 1N4 Abstract In a lexical decision task (LDT), Pexman, Lupker, and Jared (2001) reported longer response times for homophones (e.g., MAID-MADE) than for non-homophones (e.g., MESS) and attributed these effects to orthographic competition created by feedback activation from phonology. The focus of the present research was the grain-size of the orthographic units activated by feedback from phonology. We created 9 categories of homophones based on the sublexical, orthographic overlap between members of homophone pairs. We also manipulated the type of foils presented in LDT (consonant strings, pseudowords, pseudohomophones) to create conditions involving less vs. more extensive processing. Homophone effect sizes varied by category; effects were largest when spellings of both onsets and bodies differed within the homophone pairs (e.g., KERNEL-COLONEL) and when members of the homophone pairs differed by vowel graphemes (e.g., BRAKE-BREAK). These results suggest that several specific grain-sizes of orthographic representation are activated by feedback phonology. Feedback activation is assumed to operate between all sets of units in the word recognition system. The focus of the present research, however, was feedback activation from phonology to orthography. Taft and van Graan (1998; see also Taft, 1991) argued for bi-directional activation between orthography and phonology by what they termed “orthography-phonology-orthography rebound”. The model of word recognition they described was similar to models proposed by Grainger and Ferrand (1994), Plaut et al. (1996), and Van Orden and Goldinger (1994). A version of this model is illustrated in Figure 1. This is a connectionist model with sets of processing units representing orthographic, phonological, and semantic information. Importantly, the orthographic and phonological components of the model (but not the semantic component) are “composed of a hierarchy of units ranging from graphemes (e.g., C, A, and T) and phonemes (e.g., /k/, /ae/, and /t/) up to whole words. Activation passes up this hierarchy as well as between O and P units at the same level.” (p. 206). Introduction In a number of recent articles in the word recognition literature, the notion of feedback activation has been invoked to explain particular findings (e.g., Hino & Lupker, 1996; Pecher, in press; Pexman & Lupker, 1999; Pexman, Lupker, & Jared, 2001; Stone, Vanhoy, & Van Orden, 1997; Taft & van Graan, 1998; Ziegler, Montant, & Jacobs, 1997). In a fully interactive model of word recognition (e.g., the PDP model of Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, & Patterson, 1996) activation between sets of units can be bi-directional. For instance, in a lexical decision task, when a target word is presented, there is initial activation of an orthographic representation for the target, and then very quickly there is also activation of semantic and phonological representations for that word. Those semantic and phonological representations then re-activate, via feedback connections, the orthographic representation. This bi-directional flow of activation can help the system settle on a representation for the target word. The purpose of the present research was to address an unresolved issue regarding feedback activation: What is the nature (grain-size) of the orthographic units that are activated by feedback from phonology? S CAT kaet AT aet O P C A T k t Figure 1: As depicted in Taft & van Graan (1998), a model of word recognition with sets of units representing orthography (O), phonology (P), and semantics (S). Taft and van Graan (1998) argued that, when processing printed words, there is automatic activation of the phonological component of the model. Certainly, there has been controversy about the role that phonology plays in
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To what extent is handwritten word production based on phonological codes? A few studies conducted in Western languages have recently provided evidence showing that phonology contributes to the retrieval of graphemic properties in written output tasks. Less is known about how orthographic production works in languages with non-alphabetic scripts such as written Chinese. We report a Stroop study in which Chinese participants wrote the colour of characters on a digital graphic tablet; characters were either neutral, or homophonic to the target (congruent), or homophonic to an alternative (incongruent). Facilitation was found from congruent homophonic distractors, but only when the homophone shared the same tone with the target. This finding suggests a contribution of phonology to written word production. A second experiment served as a control experiment to exclude the possibility that the effect in Experiment 1 had an exclusively semantic locus. Overall, the findings offer new insight into the relative contribution of phonology to handwriting, particularly in non-Western languages.
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Four experiments tested whether homophone dominance modulates the phonemic-masking effect. Dominance was estimated by the relative frequency of homophone pairs. Positive phonemic-masking effects occurred for dominant homophones, and null phonemic-masking effects occurred for subordinate homophones. Also, subordinate homophones were much more likely to be falsely identified as their dominant mate. The source of these null phonemic-masking effects was traced to a competition between the homophone's spelling mediated by their common phonology-a null phonemic-masking effect that is itself a phonology effect. These findings converge with a growing body of phonology effects produced under conditions thought to prejudice word perception against phonology. Phonology, thus, appears to supply mandatory constraints in the perception of printed words.
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Spelling
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