Wawk on the wild side: Context-dependence of pseudohomophone processing

The pseudohomophone (PH) effect refers to an established finding whereby in a visual lexical decision task, nonword letter strings that are pronounced like real words (e.g., WAWK) are harder to reject than nonword strings that are not pronounced like real words (e.g., FLIS). This article reports three lexical decision experiments that aimed at further exploring the underlying processing mechanisms. In Experiments 1 and 2, we compared PHs like WAWK with unpronounceable nonwords like NRUG and pronounceable nonwords like FLIS, making sure that all stimuli (including real-word fillers) were carefully matched in length, bigram frequency, and number of orthographic neighbors. Matching stimuli in this way resulted in the real-word fillers to be of low lexical frequency (lower than for the PHs' base words). Experiment 1 employed a standard lexical decision task, whereas Experiment 2 used the two-alternative forced choice eye-tracking paradigm originally developed in Kunert and Scheepers (2014). Both experiments converged on showing a reversal of the classical PH effect: while unpronounceable strings like NRUG were correctly rejected relatively quickly, PHs like WAWK were indeed easier to reject than pronounceable nonwords like FLIS. Our final Experiment 3, by contrast, confirmed a "classical" PH effect when the same nonword stimuli were tested against high- rather than low-frequency words as fillers. We conclude that the direction of the PH effect strongly depends on the overall material context.