Effects of homophony on reading aloud

This paper examines whether homophones have a ‘shared’ (e.g., Levelt, Roelofs & Meyer, 1999) or ‘independent’ (e.g., Caramazza, Costa, Miozzo, & Bi, 2001) representation(s). A homophone reading aloud task is carried out with low frequency irregular homophones (e.g., “suite” v's “sweet”) and matched low frequency irregular non-homophonic controls (e.g., “swan”). The ‘shared’ account predicts a homophone advantage, because the low frequency homophone benefits from its high frequency partner. The ‘independent’ account predicts neither an advantage nor a disadvantage, reading performance should be governed by the homophone’s specific-word frequency. Surprisingly, we find a homophone disadvantage in the reading aloud task: homophones are read slower than their non-homophonic controls. Results are replicated with an independent database of reading latencies (Balota, Cortese, Hutchison, Neely, Nelson, Simpson, & Treiman, 2002). Additionally, an attempt is undertaken to simulate the homophone disadvantage effect using the Dual Route Cascaded (DRC) computational model of reading (Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001).