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Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is characterized by impaired development of social communication, cognition, emotions and behavior. This study explores the reading performance of Chinese–English bilinguals with ASD in Hong Kong in relation to local coherence under the Central Coherence Theory. Two tasks were conducted with 22 Chinese–English bilinguals with ASD (M = 9;07), whose mean age was 9 years old and seven months at time of study, and 24 typically developing (TD) controls (M = 9;04), whose mean age was 9 years old and 4 months, to investigate reading at the word and sentence levels. Two groups of participants were matched by chronological age and grade level. Based on the Central Coherence Theory, children with ASD are expected to have difficulty using context to disambiguate between homophones or homographs. We first employed a homograph task using two-character Chinese words to investigate context effects. Participants of both groups were given 40 pairs of words in which the first character provided a contextual cue to the pronunciation of the second, or vice versa. The findings suggested that participants with ASD were able to use the local context to give appropriate pronunciations of the homographs, performing as well as TD participants given the word-level context and explicit instructions. In the homophone task, participants judged the use of homophones based on the content of the sentence. While the results for English homophones were consistent with previous homograph studies, judgements of the Chinese homophones depended instead on the word level. The participants benefitted from the immediate Chinese linguistic context, ignoring global features and focusing on local ones. These two results contradicted previous findings in studies on English where participants with ASD showed difficulty in distinguishing homographs. We suggest this is because in Chinese, one character in a two-character word can serve as a contextual cue to the pronunciation of homographs or usage of homophones. Therefore, immediate linguistic context and local contextual cues facilitate children with ASD’s reading of homographs/homophones in Chinese.

We examine the use of multiple subphonemic differences distinguishing homophones in production and perception, through a case study focusing on the distinction between two polysemous senses of the English word “sorry” (apology vs. attention-seeking). An analysis of production data from voice actors revealed significant and substantial durational differences between the two meanings. Tokens expressing an apology were longer than attention-seeking tokens, and the situational intensity of the context also independently affected duration. When asked to identify the meaning in a two-way forced-choice task after hearing each token spliced out of its context, listeners were above chance (64.7% accuracy) in identifying the intended meaning, and their responses were significantly correlated with the duration, intensity, and intonation contour (but not mean F0) of the productions. In a second perception task, listeners heard tokens of “sorry” that had been systematically manipulated to vary in duration, intensity, and intonation contour, with responses indicating that each of these dimensions played an independent role in listeners’ judgments. The results highlight the importance of broadening the scope of research on the use of subphonemic detail during lexical access and considering a wider range of lexical and non-lexical factors that condition variability on multiple acoustic dimensions, in order to work toward a more accurate picture of the systematic variability available in the input and tracked by listeners.

Recent studies showed that some adults with dyslexia have difficulty processing sequentially arranged information. In a companion study, this deficit manifested as low accuracy during a word pair comparison task involving same/different decisions when two words differed in their letter sequences. This sequential deficit was associated with left/right spatial letter confusion. In the present study, we found the same underlying difficulty with sequential and spatial letter processing during word spelling. Participants were the same 22 adults with dyslexia and 20 age- and gender-matched controls as in the companion study. In the spelling task, sequential error rates were higher in the dyslexia group, compared to the controls. Measures of accuracy of serial letter order during the spelling task and the word comparison task were correlated. Only three participants, each with dyslexia, produced left/right letter reversals during spelling. These were the same participants who produced left/right errors when naming single letters. They also had profound difficulty with sequential and left/right letter processing in the spelling and word comparison tasks, and they had the most severe spelling impairment. We conclude that this pervasive, persistent difficulty with sequential and spatial reversals contributes to a severe dyslexia subtype. In the dyslexia group as a whole, additional and separate sources of errors were underspecified word representations in long-term memory and homophone errors that likely represent language-based deficits in word knowledge. In the participants, these three factors (sequential/spatial letter confusion, underspecified word form representation, language-based deficits) occurred either as single factors or in combination with each other.

This study examines how individual pragmatic skills, and more specifically, empathy, influences language processing when a temporary lexical ambiguity can be resolved via intonation. We designed a visual-world eye-tracking experiment in which participants could anticipate a referent before disambiguating lexical information became available, by inferring either a contrast meaning or a confirmatory meaning from the intonation contour alone. Our results show that individual empathy skills determine how listeners deal with the meaning alternatives of an ambiguous referent, and the way they use intonational meaning to disambiguate the referent. Listeners with better pragmatic skills (higher empathy) were sensitive to intonation cues when forming sound-meaning associations during the unfolding of an ambiguous referent, and showed higher sensitivity to all the alternative interpretations of that ambiguous referent. Less pragmatically skilled listeners showed weaker processing of intonational meaning because they needed subsequent disambiguating material to select a referent and showed less sensitivity to the set of alternative interpretations. Overall, our results call for taking into account individual pragmatic differences in the study of intonational meaning processing and sentence comprehension in general.

Numerous studies have provided evidence that readers generate phonological codes while reading. However, a central question in much of this research has been how early these codes are generated. Answering this question has implications for the roles that phonological coding might play for skilled readers, especially whether phonological codes affect the identification of most words, which can only be the case if these codes are generated rapidly. To investigate the time course of phonological coding during silent reading, the present series of experiments examined survival analyses of first-fixation durations on phonologically related (homophones, pseudohomophones) and orthographic control (orthographically matched words and nonwords) stimuli that were either embedded in sentences in place of correct targets (Experiments 1 and 2) or presented as parafoveal previews for correct targets using the boundary paradigm (Experiments 3 and 4). Survival analyses revealed a discernible difference between processing the phonologically related versus the orthographic control items by as early as 160 ms from the start of fixation on average (160-173 ms across experiments). Because only approximately 18% of first fixation durations were shorter than these mean estimates and follow-up tests revealed that earlier divergence point estimates were associated with shorter gaze durations (e.g., more rapid word identification), results suggest that skilled readers rapidly generate phonological codes during normal, silent reading and that these codes may affect the identification of most words. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Gestures that co-occur with speech are a fundamental component of communication. Prior research with children suggests that gestures may help them to resolve certain forms of lexical ambiguity, including homophones. To test this idea in the context of human-robot interaction, the effects of iconic and deictic gestures on the understanding of homophones was assessed in an experiment where a humanoid robot told a short story containing pairs of homophones to small groups of young participants, accompanied by either expressive gestures or no gestures. Both groups of subjects completed a pretest and post-test to measure their ability to discriminate between pairs of homophones and we calculated aggregated precision. The results show that the use of iconic and deictic gestures aids in general understanding of homophones, providing additional evidence for the importance of gesture to the development of children’s language and communication skills.

Background Whether lexical and sub-lexical orthographic skills relate to each other and to reading was investigated in French 3rd and 5th graders. Methods Two homophone choice tasks were constructed (1) by manipulating the frequency of words sub-lexical features (choose the correct spelling in boat - bacht vs yacht - yoat) and (2) by matching items on their sub-lexical properties (beach - beech). More, two orthographic choice tasks measured (1) sensitivity to legal versus illegal sub-lexical patterns (rouve - rouvve) and (2) distributional probabilities (doat - dacht). Regular, irregular and pseudoword reading were assessed. Results/Conclusions On the one hand, performances were higher for words with more frequent sub-lexical features, in favour of an impact of both lexical and sub-lexical skills in the homophone choice task. This effect was however significant in the grade 3 group only, revealing stronger reliance on sub-lexical orthographic knowledge during lexical retrieval in the younger group only. On the other hand, performances on orthographic choice tasks improved with grade and revealed to be higher for the task involving all-or-none patterns compared with that involving distributional probabilities. Regarding the relationships between this set of measures, the data revealed that the purer measure of lexical orthographic skills significantly correlated with sub-lexical skills and irregular word reading; yet none of the measures that involved sub-lexical orthographic skills correlated with reading.

Attention and working memory are cross-domain functions that regulate both behavioural and learning processes. Few longitudinal studies have focused on the impact of these cognitive resources on spelling skills in the early phase of learning to write. This longitudinal study investigates the contributions of attention and working memory processes to spelling accuracy and handwriting speed in 112 primary school children (2nd, 3rd, and 4th grade, age range: 7.6–9.4 years) learning to write in the Italian transparent orthography. Standardised batteries were used to assess their attention and working memory skills, as well as their spelling. Homophone and non-homophone errors were measured, as they may involve different attentional and working memory processes. The results showed that, for 2nd grade children, selective attention shifting, planning, and inhibition predicted non-homophone errors, whereas sequential working memory predicted homophone errors and writing speed was explained by planning and selective attention. In 3rd grade, only homophone errors were predicted by planning and inhibition. No significant relationships were found in 4th grade, nor in the transition across grades. Dynamic and diversified roles of attentional and working memory processes in predicting different writing skills in early primary school years emerged, with a gradual decrease in the attention–writing relationship with age.

Unlike in English, the role of phonology in word recognition in Chinese is unclear. In this event-related potential experiment, we investigated the role of phonology in reading both high- and low-frequency two-character compound Chinese words. Participants executed semantic and homophone judgment tasks of the same precede-target pairs. Each pair of either high- or low-frequency words were either unrelated (control condition) or related semantically or phonologically (homophones). The induced P200 component was greater for low- than for high-frequency word-pairs both in semantic and phonological tasks. Homophones in the semantic judgment task and semantically-related words in the phonology task both elicited a smaller N400 than the control condition, word frequency-independently. However, for low-frequency words in the phonological judgment task, it was found that the semantically related pairs released a significantly larger P200 than the control condition. Thus, the semantic activation of both high- and low-frequency words may be no later than phonological activation.

In the present preregistered study, we evaluated the possibility of a shared cognitive mechanism during verbal and non-verbal tasks and therefore the implication of domain-general cognitive control during language comprehension. We hypothesized that a behavioral cost will be observed during a dual-task including both verbal and non-verbal difficult processing. Specifically, to test this claim, we designed a dual-task paradigm involving: an auditory language comprehension task (sentence comprehension) and a non-verbal Flanker task (including congruent and incongruent trials). We manipulated sentence ambiguity and evaluated if the ambiguity effect modified behavioral performances in the non-verbal Flanker task. Under the assumption that ambiguous sentences induce a more difficult process than unambiguous sentences, we expected non-verbal flanker task performances to be impaired only when a simultaneous difficult language processing is performed. This would be specifically reflected by a performance cost during incongruent Flanker items only during ambiguous sentence presentation. Conversely, we observed a facilitatory effect for the incongruent Flanker items during ambiguous sentence suggesting better non-verbal inhibitory performances when an ambiguous sentence was simultaneously processed. Exploratory data analysis suggests that this effect is not only related to a more difficult language processing but also to the previous (n-1) Flanker item. Indeed, results showed that incongruent n-1 Flanker items led to a facilitation of the incongruent synchronized Flanker items only when ambiguous sentences were conjointly presented. This result, even if it needs to be corroborated in future studies, suggests that the recruitment of executive control mechanisms facilitates subsequent executive control implication during difficult language processing. The present study suggests a common executive control mechanism during difficult verbal and non-verbal tasks.

Speech comprehension is often challenged by background noise or other acoustic interference. It can also be challenged by linguistic factors, such as complex syntax, or the presence of words with more than one meaning. Pupillometry is increasingly recognized as a technique that provides a window onto acoustic challenges, but this work has not been well integrated with an older literature linking pupil dilation to “mental effort”, which would include linguistic challenges. Here, we measured pupil dilation while listeners heard spoken sentences with clear sentence-level meaning that contained words with more than one meaning (“The shell was fired towards the tank”) or matched sentences without ambiguous words (“Her secrets were written in her diary”). This semantic-ambiguity manipulation was crossed with an acoustic manipulation: two levels of a 30-talker babble masker in Experiment 1; and presence or absence of a pink noise masker in Experiment 2. Speech comprehension, indexed by a semantic relatedness task, was high (above 82% correct) in all conditions. Pupils dilated when sentences included semantically ambiguous words compared to matched sentences and when maskers were present compared to absent (Experiment 2) or were more compared to less intense (Experiment 1). The current results reinforce the idea that many different challenges to speech comprehension, that afford different cognitive processes and are met by the brain in different ways, manifest as an increase in pupil dilation.

We examine unintentional spelling errors on verb homophones in informal online chat conversations of Flemish adolescents. In experiments, these verb forms yielded an effect of homophone dominance, i.e., most errors occurred on the lower-frequency form (Sandra et al., 1999). Verb homophones are argued to require the conscious application of a spelling rule, which may cause a temporary overload of working memory resources and trigger automatic retrieval of the higher-frequency spelling from the mental lexicon. Unlike most previous research, we investigate homophone intrusions in a natural writing context. Thus, we test the ‘ecological validity’ of psycholinguistic experiments. Importantly, this study relates these psycholinguistic constructs to different social variables in social media writing to test a prediction that directly follows from Sandra et al.’s account. Whereas social factors likely affect the error rates, they should not affect the error pattern: the number of working memory failures occurs at another processing level than the homophone intrusions. Hence, the focus is on the interaction between homophone dominance and the social variables. The errors for two types of verb homophones reveal (a) an impact of all social variables, (b) an effect of homophone dominance, and (c) no interaction between this effect and the social factors.

The neural basis of dyslexia in different languages remains unresolved, and it is unclear whether the phonological deficit as the core deficit of dyslexia is language-specific or universal. The current functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study using whole-brain data-driven network analyses investigated the neural mechanisms for phonological and orthographic processing in Chinese children with good and poor reading ability. Sixteen good readers and 16 poor readers were requested to make homophone judgments (phonological processing) and component judgments (visual-orthographic processing) of presented Chinese characters. Poor readers displayed worse performance than the good readers in phonological processing, but not in orthographic processing. Whole-brain activation analyses showed compensatory activations in the poor readers during phonological processing and automatic phonological production activation in the good readers during orthographic processing. Significant group differences in the topological properties of their brain networks were found only in orthographic processing. Analyses of nodal degree centrality and betweenness centrality revealed significant group differences in both phonological and orthographic processing. The present study supports the phonological core deficit hypothesis of reading difficulty in Chinese. It also suggests that Chinese good and poor readers might recruit different strategies and neural mechanisms for orthographic processing.

Although much of the research on morphology and aphasia has focused specifically on the distinction between regular and irregular verb production, individuals with aphasia often present with differences in performance within these categories. While these within-category differences are relatively understudied, they have the potential to inform our understanding of the morphological processing system and treatment protocols for morphological impairment. The present study examines how morphophonological patterns in English impact past-tense production within the categories of regular and irregular verbs based on errors of an individual with acquired morphological impairment. Acquired morphological impairment was demonstrated by performance on two reading tasks. First, the individual produced more final consonant deletion errors in morphologically complex words (prays→[pre]) compared to homophones (praise→[pre]). Second, morphological deletion errors were found to occur at comparable rates for inflected regular verbs (sinned→sin) and inflected irregular verbs (won→win), whereas the analogous error (e.g. ton→tin) never occurred on the monomorphemic pairs. In order to examine differences within each category, we used a past-tense elicitation task designed to analyse the effect of differences in morphophonological pattern frequency on accuracy and error patterns in production. We found production of both regular and irregular verbs was affected by the extent to which different morphophonological patterns are supported in the language (i.e. the number of phonologically similar words within the lexicon which take the same inflectional change). These results provide evidence that morphophonological patterns are encoded in a way that impact morphological production, a finding which has both clinical and theoretical implications.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to introduce the homophone emotional interest superiority effect in phonological, or sound-based, priming, whereby pseudohomophone brand names (i.e. non-words that are pronounced identically to English words, for example, Bie) prime brand meaning associated with the member of the homophone pair that is emotionally interesting (i.e. Bie will be prime brand avoidance (purchase) when consumers are emotionally interested in the homophone bye [buy]). Design/methodology/approach Studies 1 and 2 examine the effect of homophone emotional interest on brand judgements and behaviours. Study 3 investigates the role of boredom with the brand name in attenuating the homophone emotional interest superiority effect. Findings Findings indicate that pseudohomophone brand names prime brand judgements and behaviours associated with the word from the homophone pair that evokes emotional interest. Study 2 provides further evidence of homophone emotional interest as the process influencing brand judgements and behaviours. Study 3 establishes that the effect of pseudohomophone brand names on brand judgements weaken when boredom with the brand name is induced. Research limitations/implications This study is limited, as it focuses only on fictitious brands and methodologically creates boredom in a way in which may not be typical of what would be experienced in the real world. Practical implications This study has important implications for brand managers in the development of new brand names and in prioritising the intended homophone pair from a pseudohomophone brand name to influence consumer judgements and behaviours. Originality/value This study introduces and provides evidence of a homophone emotional interest superiority effect. This study also identifies a condition under which the homophone emotional interest superiority effect is attenuated.

We introduce pictorial-based homophones as effective priming cues that influence consumer product attribute beliefs (i.e., a picture of a sail primes the perception of ‘discount’: target perception: ‘sale’), advertisement attitudinal judgments (i.e., a picture of a grater primes more ‘favorable’ attitudes toward an advertisement; target perception: ‘great’), and purchase intentions (i.e., a picture of wood primes ‘intent’ to purchase; target perception: ‘would’). Across three studies we demonstrate that pictorial-based homophone priming effects manifest only when consumers subvocalize (inner voice) the homophone in the image. Results provide evidence to suggest that the absence of orthography (spelling) in pictorial-based homophones and the inability to pre-activate spelling representations results in a failure to suppress the priming effect. Results also demonstrate that facilitating spelling verification disambiguates the word's meaning, resulting in suppression of the irrelevant homophone. This research has implications for advertisers and brand managers in the executional development of advertisements designed to influence consumer judgments.

It is commonly accepted that phonological codes can be activated parafoveally during reading and later used to aid foveal word recognition- a finding known as the phonological preview benefit. However, a closer look at the literature shows that this effect may be less consistent than what is sometimes believed. To determine the extent to which phonology is processed parafoveally, a Bayesian meta-analysis of 27 experiments and a survey of the unpublished literature were conducted. While the results were generally consistent with the phonological preview benefit (>90% probability of a true effect in gaze durations), the size of the effect was small. Readers of alphabetical orthographies obtained a modest benefit of only 4 ms in gaze durations. Interestingly, Chinese readers showed a larger effect (6–14 ms in size). There was no difference in the magnitude of the phonological preview benefit between homophone and pseudo-homophone previews, thus suggesting that the modest processing advantage is indeed related to the activation of phonological codes from the parafoveal word. Simulations revealed that the results are relatively robust to missing studies, although the effects may be 19–22% smaller if all missing studies found a null effect. The results suggest that while phonology can be processed parafoveally, this happens only to a limited extent. Because phonological priming effects in single-word recognition are small (10–13 ms; Rastle & Brysbaert, 2006) and there is a loss of visual acuity in the parafovea, it is argued that large phonological preview benefit effects may be unlikely.

We investigated effects of crosslinguistic phonological and semantic similarity on the bilingual lexicon of late unbalanced bilinguals. Our masked priming paradigm used L1 (Russian) words as masked primes and L2 (English) words as targets. The primes and the targets either overlapped – phonologically, semantically, both phonologically and semantically – or did not overlap. Participants maintained the targets in memory and matched them against occasionally presented catch stimuli. N170 and N400 components of the word-elicited high-density ERPs were identified and analysed in signal and source space. Crosslinguistic semantic similarity shortened the reaction times. The semantics-related N400 amplitude difference correlated with individual L2 proficiency, while phonological similarity suppressed the N400 amplitude in the semantically unrelated condition. ERP source analysis suggests that these ERP dynamics are underpinned by cortical generators in the left IFG and the temporal pole. We conclude that the semantic and phonological interplay between L1 and L2 suggest an integrated bilingual lexicon.

The purpose of this study was to investigate consistency in spelling skills across 2 different tasks of written production (dictation vs. composition) and stability of performance across 4 different grades. We assessed 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders’ spelling performance through 4 tasks: 2 dictation tasks (passage and sentences) and 2 composition tasks (description and narrative). For both tasks, we identified homophone and non-homophone errors. With respect to the findings for intertask consistency and stability, there were significant positive correlations between spelling inaccuracy in dictation and composition for all grades assessed. We also confirmed these findings for the subsample of inaccurate spellers, which suggests that children struggling in spelling do not benefit from a specific task (dictation or composition).

Spelling is a literacy skill that must be mastered during children’s academic development. It involves a variety of cognitive factors, including morphological awareness. Studies in the alphabet and Chinese systems have shown that there is a close relationship between morphological awareness and spelling. Although there is clearly a significant unidirectional effect of morphological awareness on spelling significantly, few studies have explored the bidirectional relationship between morphological awareness and spelling. This three-time point longitudinal study was designed to investigate the reciprocal effects of morphological awareness and character spelling in Chinese. Participants included 124 children from two primary schools in Mainland China. The students were tracked from first grade to third grade and were administered a battery of tests to measure morphological awareness (e.g., homophone awareness, homograph awareness, and compounding awareness) and spelling to dictation, controlling for IQ, phonological awareness, and orthographic awareness. A structural equation model was utilized to examine the reciprocal relation between the students’ morphological awareness and character spelling. Results showed that earlier morphological awareness predicted subsequent spelling abilities from first grade to third grade and spelling in first grade predicted morphological awareness in second grade; however, spelling in second grade did not predict the subsequent morphological awareness in third grade. This study suggests that there is a bidirectional association between morphological awareness and spelling from first grade to second grade in Chinese, and a unidirectional association between morphological awareness and spelling from second grade to third grade. Future studies could examine the causal relationship between morphological awareness and character spelling by using an instructional intervention.

Much of the literature surrounding bilingual spoken word recognition is based on bilinguals of non-tonal languages. In the Mandarin spoken word recognition literature, lexical tones are often considered as equally important as segments in lexical processing. It is unclear whether and how lexical tones contribute to bilingual language processing. One recent study demonstrates that tonal bilinguals require the availability of both tonal and segmental information to induce cross-language lexical competition during bilingual lexical access, even without phonological overlap between the target and non-target language. The current study investigates whether overt phonological overlap between the target and non-target language would equally require both tonal and segmental information available to induce cross-language lexical competition. We employed two auditory lexical decision experiments with both Mandarin-English bilinguals and English monolinguals to test whether inter-lingual homophones (IH) would induce lexical competition from the non-target language, L1 Mandarin. Our results show that cross-language lexical competition was only observed with the presence of lexical tones, in addition to segmental overlap.

The purpose of this study was to examine the role and nature of phonology in silent reading of Japanese sentences. An experiment was conducted using a Japanese sentence acceptability judgment task. One important finding was that participants more rapidly rejected homophonic sentences in which one two-kanji compound word was replaced by its homophone word than non-homophonic sentences. In the latter, the word was replaced by a non-homophone spelling control; that is, we observed a homophone advantage. Participants were able to identify the correct word easily through foil's homophonic mate. This indicated that activated phonology played a role in the Japanese sentence acceptability judgment task and it contributed to the error detection/recovery process. Another important finding was that the homophone facilitation effect remained under articulatory suppression. It confirmed that phonology was activated at an early stage as abstract, non-articulatory phonology.

This study investigates the development of metalinguistic skills, particularly ambiguity detection, and whether training accelerates this development for prereaders in kindergarten (5;5–6;6). It is the first to compare homophone detection with lexically ambiguous sentence detection in which the same homophones appear. The experimental group received ambiguity detection training; the control group received vocabulary training. Results showed that there is a spontaneous development of homophone detection abilities at the end of kindergarten, and training may accelerate this trajectory. The development of lexical ambiguity detection is not apparent in kindergarteners. However, explicit training improves this trajectory significantly. The knowledge of both meanings of a homophone is not sufficient to report both meanings of a sentence that contains that homophone. We propose that detecting the dual meanings of an ambiguous sentence involves sentence processing operations and an ability to think flexibly about language that may be enhanced with training.

Studies of working memory for musical tone are seldom reported, and verbal working memory experiments have not focused on the tonal aspects of a language such as Mandarin Chinese. We examined the relationships among musical experience, tonal language processing, and working memory in adult reading of musical notation and Mandarin Chinese. We hypothesized that 30 adults with formal musical training trained in translating print to sound in sight-reading would have an advantage over 30 adults without formal musical training in converting print to lexical tone in reading a tonal language. Using n-back reading tasks, we found that the adults with formal musical training were better able to extract lexical tone information from print than the adults without formal musical training, or to maintain it in working memory. Even in a Mandarin homophone task, requiring phonological judgments of print, adults with formal musical training demonstrated superior performance. We discuss possible reasons why musical experience facilitates processing of phonology and lexical tone in reading tasks.

The study of homophones—words with different meanings that sound the same--has great potential to inform models of language production. Of particular relevance is a phenomenon termed frequency inheritance, where a low frequency word (e.g., deer) is produced more fluently than would be expected based on its frequency characteristics, presumably because of shared phonology with a high-frequency homophone counterpart (e.g., dear). However, prior studies have been inconsistent in showing frequency inheritance. To explain this inconsistency, we propose a dual nature account of homophony: a high-frequency counterpart exerts two counterposing effects on a low frequency homophone target during the two main stages of naming: (1) a detrimental impact during semantically-driven lexical retrieval; (2) a beneficial impact during phonological retrieval. In a study of naming in participants with chronic aphasia followed by computational investigations, we find strong evidence for the dual nature account of homophony.

Objective Inner speech, or the ability to talk to yourself in your head, is one of the most ubiquitous phenomena of everyday experience. Recent years have seen growing interest in the role and function of inner speech in various typical and cognitively impaired populations. Although people vary in their ability to produce inner speech, there is currently no test battery which can be used to evaluate people's inner speech ability. Here we developed a test battery which can be used to evaluate individual differences in the ability to access the auditory word form internally. Methods We developed and standardized five tests: rhyme judgment of pictures and written words, homophone judgment of written words and non-words, and judgment of lexical stress of written words. The tasks were administered to adult healthy native British English speakers (age range 20-72, n = 28-97, varies between tests). Results In all tests, some items were excluded based on low success rates among participants, or documented regional variability in accent. Level of education, but not age, correlated with task performance for some of the tasks, and there were no gender difference in performance. Conclusion A process of standardization resulted in a battery of tests which can be used to assess natural variability of inner speech abilities among English speaking adults.

To examine the neural signatures of language co-activation and control during bilingual spoken word comprehension, Korean-English bilinguals and English monolinguals were asked to make overt or covert semantic relatedness judgments on auditorily-presented English word pairs. In two critical conditions, participants heard word pairs consisting of an English-Korean interlingual homophone (e.g., the sound /mu:n/ means “moon” in English and “door” in Korean) as the prime and an English word as the target. In the homophone-related condition, the target (e.g., “lock”) was related to the homophone’s Korean meaning, but not related to the homophone’s English meaning. In the homophone-unrelated condition, the target was unrelated to either the homophone’s Korean meaning or the homophone’s English meaning. In overtly responded situations, ERP results revealed that the reduced N400 effect in bilinguals for homophone-related word pairs correlated positively with the amount of their daily exposure to Korean. In covertly responded situations, ERP results showed a reduced late positive component for homophone-related word pairs in the right hemisphere, and this late positive effect was related to the neural efficiency of suppressing interference in a non-linguistic task. Together, these findings suggest 1) that the degree of language co-activation in bilingual spoken word comprehension is modulated by the amount of daily exposure to the non-target language; and 2) that bilinguals who are less influenced by cross-language activation may also have greater efficiency in suppressing interference in a non-linguistic task.

Neuroimaging literature has documented age-related hemispheric asymmetry reduction in frontal regions during task performances. As most studies employed working memory paradigms, it is therefore less clear if this pattern of neural reorganization is constrained by working memory processes or it would also emerge in other cognitive domains which are predominantly lateralized. Using blocked functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the present study used a homophone judgment task and a line judgment task to investigate age-related differences in functional hemispheric asymmetry in language and visuospatial processing respectively. Young and older adults achieved similar task accuracy although older adults required a significantly longer time. Age-related functional hemispheric asymmetry reduction was found only in dorsal inferior frontal gyrus and was associated with better performance when the homophone condition was contrasted against fixation, and not line condition. Our data thus highlights the importance of considering regional heterogeneity of aging effects together with general age-related cognitive processes. Accepted version

In two visual world eye tracking studies, we examined the activation of subordinate meanings of ambiguous homophones in Hindi and particularly when the sentence context is biased towards the dominant meaning. Participants listened to sentences that were either neutral or biased towards the dominant meaning of the homophone and saw a display containing four pictures. In experiment 1, the display had a shape competitor of the subordinate meaning of the homophone in both neutral and biased conditions along with three unrelated distractors. Experiment 2 had semantic competitors of the subordinate meaning of the homophones along with three distractors. Proportion of fixations to different objects overtime suggested that participants activated the subordinate meanings and oriented their attention to the shape and semantic competitors even when the prior context was biased towards the dominant meaning. Overall, these data from Hindi provide further support to those models of lexical access that assume exhaustive access of both the meanings of an ambiguous homophone. These data suggest even a dominant bias does not eliminate the activation of perceptual and conceptual features of the subordinate meaning.

Research supports the claim that, when understanding language, people perform mental simulation using those parts of the brain which support sensation, action, and emotion. A major criticism of the findings quoted as evidence for embodied simulation, however, is that they could be a result of conscious image generation strategies. Here we exploit the well-known fact that bilinguals routinely and automatically activate both their languages during comprehension to test whether this automatic process is, in turn, modulated by embodied simulatory processes. Dutch participants heard English sentences containing interlingual homophones and implying specific distance relations, and had to subsequently respond to pictures of objects matching or mismatching this implied distance. Participants were significantly slower to reject critical items when their perceptual features matched said distance relationship. These results suggest that bilinguals not only activate task-irrelevant meanings of interlingual homophones, but also automatically simulate these meanings in a detailed perceptual fashion. Our study supports the claim that embodied simulation is not due to participants' conscious strategies, but is an automatic component of meaning construction.

Several neuropsychological studies have reported that patients with memory deficits exhibit a dissociation of effects attributed to semantic and lexical-phonological information in verbal working memory (e.g., Reilly, Martin, & Grossman, 2005; Romani & Martin, 1999). The present study reports on 3 experiments conducted with individuals without memory problems to examine the dissociation between the word imageability effect (WIE) and the word frequency effect (WFE). Experiment 1 used a modified semantic recognition task, in which participants were presented with 10-item lists and selected synonyms of list words from among 5 words. This task led to a significant WIE but no WFE. On the other hand, Experiment 2 used a modified recognition task in which targets were homophones, to promote the usage of phonological information while minimizing the potential impact of semantic information. There was no WIE but a significant WFE in Experiment 2. Experiment 3 replicated the results of Experiment 1 using 5-item lists and a 2-alternative forced choice procedure. Taken together, these results systematically replicate the double dissociation observed in neuropsychological studies. These findings suggest that semantic information can contribute to successful retrieval from verbal working memory without mediation from lexical-phonological information.

The Stroop task was used to investigate the role of phonological processing in semantic access for written Chinese language. Fourteen children were recruited to perform the Stroop task, using color characters, their homophones and neutral characters as stimuli. Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) was used to measure the brain activation in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) during the task. In view of better sensitivity, oxy-hemoglobin was chosen to indicate the task activation. In behavioral performance, there was a significant classical Stroop interference effect as indexed by longer response time and higher error rate for the color task than the neutral task, whereas there was no evident interference effect for the color homophones. The NIRS data agreed with the behavioral data, and showed a significant Stroop effect only for the color characters in the bilateral PFC. These results suggested that phonology may not play an important role in semantic activation of Chinese characters for children.

Does speaker emotion affect degree of ambiguity in referring expressions? We used referential communication tasks preceded by mood induction to examine whether positive emotional valence may be linked to ambiguity of referring expressions. In Experiment 1, participants had to identify sequences of objects with homophonic labels (e.g., the animal bat, a baseball bat) for hypothetical addressees. This required modification of the homophones. Happy speakers were less likely to modify the second homophone to repair a temporary ambiguity (i.e., they were less likely to say … first cover the bat, then cover the baseball bat …). In Experiment 2, participants had to identify one of two identical objects in an object array, which required a modifying relative clause (the shark that's underneath the shoe). Happy speakers omitted the modifying relative clause twice as often as neutral speakers (e.g., by saying Put the shark underneath the sheep), thereby rendering the entire utterance ambiguous in the context of two...

This research investigated three potential asymmetries in the production and perception of homophone spelling errors: aging, homophone dominance, and priming. A homophone spelling error occurs when a contextually appropriate word (beet) is replaced with its homophone (e.g., beat glaze). Two experiments investigated young and older adults' written production and detection of these errors.Participants wrote sentences (Experiment 1) or detected errors in sentences (Experiment 2) containing a dominant homophone (beat) or subordinate homophone (beet). Homophones were preceded by a prime (neat) that shared orthography with the contextually inappropriate homophone (beat) or by an unrelated control word (fun).Results revealed an aging asymmetry in production and detection as a function of dominance. Older adults made more errors than young adults when producing dominant homophones but fewer errors in producing subordinate homophones. In contrast, older adults consistently made fewer errors than young adults when detecting homophone errors. Independent of aging, dominance had similar effects on production and detection, with more errors on subordinate homophones. Priming had asymmetric effects different from aging by increasing errors in production but not detection.These results suggest aging uniquely dissociates perception and production of homophone spelling and demonstrate circumstances under which aging benefits language processing.

Two experiments investigated the effect of facial expressions on clinically-relevant ambiguity resolution in a nonclinical sample. Experiment 1 investigated the effect of negative facial feedback (frowning) on a basic threat-interpretation bias procedure using a homophone spelling task and found that participants in a frowning condition interpreted significantly more threat/neutral homophones as threats than did participants in a neutral control condition. Experiment 2 investigated how frowning affected interpretation of bodily sensations. The findings indicated that participants in the frowning condition generated fewer positive consequences for bodily sensation scenarios and also rated the imagined bodily sensations as more negative and more of a cause for health concern. These effects could not simply be explained by differences in self-reported mood or by demand characteristics. These findings suggest that facial expressions have a moderating effect on the cognitive processes that contribute to clinically-relevant ambiguity resolution, and this has implications for clinical interventions.

Insufficient knowledge of the subtle relations between words’ spellings and their phonology is widely held to be the primary limitation in developmental dyslexia. In the present study the influence of phonology on a semantic-based reading task was compared for groups of readers with and without dyslexia. As many studies have shown, skilled readers make phonology-based false-positive errors to homophones and pseudohomophones in the semantic categorization task. The basic finding was extended to children, teens, and adults with dyslexia from familial and clinically-referred samples. Dyslexics showed the same overall pattern of phonology errors and the results were consistent across dyslexia samples, across age groups, and across experimental conditions using word and nonword homophone foils. The dyslexic groups differed from chronological-age matched controls by having elevated false-positive homophone error rates overall, and weaker effects of baseword frequency. Children with dyslexia also made more false-positive errors to spelling control foils. These findings suggest that individuals with dyslexia make use of phonology when making semantic decisions both to word homophone and non-word pseudohomophone foils and that dyslexics lack adequate knowledge of actual word spellings, compared to chronological-age and reading-level matched control participants.

Phonology is a lower-level structural aspect of language involving the sounds of a language and their organization in that language. Numerous behavioral studies utilizing priming, which refers to an increased sensitivity to a stimulus following prior experience with that or a related stimulus, have provided evidence for the role of phonology in visual word recognition. However, most language studies utilizing priming in conjunction with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have focused on lexical–semantic aspects of language processing. The aim of the present study was to investigate the neurobiological substrates of the automatic, implicit stages of phonological processing. While undergoing fMRI, eighteen individuals performed a lexical decision task (LDT) on prime-target pairs including word–word homophone and pseudoword-word pseudohomophone pairs with a prime presentation below perceptual threshold. Whole-brain analyses revealed several cortical regions exhibiting hemodynamic response suppression due to phonological priming including bilateral superior temporal gyri (STG), middle temporal gyri (MTG), and angular gyri (AG) with additional region of interest (ROI) analyses revealing response suppression in the left lateralized supramarginal gyrus (SMG). Homophone and pseudohomophone priming also resulted in different patterns of hemodynamic responses relative to one another. These results suggest that phonological processing plays a key role in visual word recognition. Furthermore, enhanced hemodynamic responses for unrelated stimuli relative to primed stimuli were observed in midline cortical regions corresponding to the default-mode network (DMN) suggesting that DMN activity can be modulated by task requirements within the context of an implicit task.

This article examines the relationship between writing and attention problems and hypothesizes that homophone spelling errors coincide with attention deficits. We analyze specific types of attention deficits, which may contribute to Attention Deficits Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD); rather than studying ADHD, however, we focus on the inattention dimension of behavior. Our methodology was to develop a survey study for exploring the coincidence of homophone errors and attention problems in schoolchildren. Two sets of parent-questionnaires characterizing individually types of Chinese handwriting errors and behavioral problems in schoolchildren were developed by the research team. Our participants were 491 Taiwanese children from the first to fifth grades in an elementary school in Taipei; they all used traditional Chinese as their primary written language of communication. Based on the ratings of the parent-questionnaires, two groups with proficient and non-proficient homophonic writing were formed. One consisted of children known to have made heterographic homophone errors (words with correct pronunciation but different spellings). The other (control group) consisted of children known to be proficient in Chinese homophone spellings. In each group, there were 54 boy and girl pupils, matched by gender, age, school and grade. A significant correlation was found between attention deficits and homophone errors. This survey study confirms our hypothesis and strengthens a currently underdeveloped theory in the literature of handwriting that attention impairments play an important role in the production of homophone errors.

Neuroimaging studies have shown that the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) plays a critical role in semantic and syntactic aspects of speech comprehension. It appears to be recruited when listeners are required to select the appropriate meaning or syntactic role for words within a sentence. However, this region is also recruited during tasks not involving sentence materials, suggesting that the systems involved in processing ambiguous words within sentences are also recruited for more domain-general tasks that involve the selection of task-relevant information. We use a novel dual-task methodology to assess whether the cognitive system(s) that are engaged in selecting word meanings are also involved in non-sentential tasks. In Experiment 1, listeners were slower to decide whether a visually presented letter is in upper or lower case when the sentence that they are simultaneously listening to contains words with multiple meanings (homophones), compared to closely matched sentences without homophones. Experiment 2 indicates that this interference effect is not tied to the occurrence of the homophone itself, but rather occurs when listeners must reinterpret a sentence that was initially misparsed. These results suggest some overlap between the cognitive system involved in semantic disambiguation and the domain-general process of response selection required for the case-judgement task. This cognitive overlap may reflect neural overlap in the networks supporting these processes, and is consistent with the proposal that domain-general selection processes in inferior frontal regions are critical for language comprehension.

Background: Patients with aphasia often complain that there is a poor correlation between the words they think (inner speech) and the words they say (overt speech). Aims: This study tried to characterise the relation between inner speech and overt speech in post-stroke aphasia. Methods & Procedures: We tested language abilities, speech apraxia, and performance on inner speech tasks, including homophone and rhyme judgements, of 27 patients with chronic post-stroke aphasia. Outcomes & Results: The patients with aphasia were distributed across the entire spectrum of abilities related to both inner and overt speech. For most patients, performance levels of inner and overt speech were similar. However, some patients had relatively better-preserved inner speech with a marked deficit in overt speech, while in others the opposite pattern was observed. Conclusions: The results are discussed within the framework of current models of language, and their implications for language therapy and aphasia diagnosis are out...

International audience; This study examines the impact of software design on user practices concerning progression and performance while working on a text reconstruction activity that is preceded by an audiovisual presentation. The entries of participants during their first task of a science-based on-line activity aimed at French-speaking University students are analyzed. The entries of 97 students working on the first activity are described in detail, and then the impact of correctness on terminating the first activity of a larger population of 142 students is examined. Students of varying degrees of motivation and language knowledge appear to personalize the task. Users generally proceeded in a linear fashion, although the option of skipping from one sentence or one paragraph to another within the text is fully available. The immediate feedback after mistakes appears to encourage users to re-enter a new spelling or conjugation of the word or a new word. While high-frequency grammatical words were often entered, avoidance of more difficult words was also recurrent. The findings suggest that users do rely upon meaning as well as language knowledge when searching for answers. There is a greater short-term retention of words in the first paragraph of the text and of text incorporated within the visual supports. While the use of dots representing letters is not relied upon by users, the immediate feedback appears to offer learners the opportunity to immediately review common mistakes such as homophones or word endings. This immediacy of feedback is a strength of computer learning that is often difficult to achieve in a classroom.

Tasks tapping visual skills, orthographic knowledge, phonological awareness, speeded naming, morphological awareness and Chinese character recognition were administered to 184 kindergarteners and 273 primary school students from Beijing. Regression analyses indicated that only syllable deletion, morphological construction and speeded number naming were unique correlates of Chinese character recognition in kindergarteners. Among primary school children, the independent correlates of character recognition were rime detection, homophone judgement, morpheme production, orthographic knowledge and speeded number naming. Results underscore the importance of some dimensions of both phonological processing and morphological awareness for both very early and intermediate Chinese reading acquisition. Although significantly correlated with character recognition in younger (but not older) children, visual skills were not uniquely associated with Chinese character reading at any grade level. However, orthographic skills were strongly associated with reading in primary school but not kindergarten, suggesting that orthographic skills are more important for literacy development as reading experience increases.

Japanese and Chinese both share the same ideographic/logographic character system. How these characters are processed, however, is inherently different for each language. We harnessed the unique property of homophone judgment in Japanese kanji to provide an analogous Chinese condition using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in 33 native Japanese speakers. We compared two types of kanji: (1) kanji that usually evokes only one pronunciation to Japanese speakers, which is representative of most Chinese characters (monophonic character); (2) kanji that evoked multiple pronunciation candidates, which is typical in Japanese kanji (heterophonic character). Results showed that character pairs with multiple sound possibilities increased activation in posterior regions of the left, middle and inferior frontal gyri (MFG and IFG), the bilateral anterior insulae, and the left anterior cingulate cortex as compared with those of kanji with only one sound. The activity seen in the MFG, dorsal IFG, and ventral IFG in the left posterior lateral prefrontal cortex, which was thought to correspond with language components of orthography, phonology, and semantics, respectively, was discussed in regards to their potentially important roles in information selection among competing sources of the components. A comparison with previous studies suggested that detailed analyses of activation in these language areas could explain differences between Japanese and Chinese, such as a greater involvement of the prefrontal language production regions for Japanese, whereas, for Chinese there is more phonological processing of inputs in the superior temporal gyrus.

Previous research indicates that mental representations of word meanings are distributed along both semantic and syntactic dimensions such that nouns and verbs are relatively distinct from one another. Two experiments examined the effect of representational distance between meanings on recognition of ambiguous spoken words by comparing recognition of unambiguous words, noun-verb homonyms, and noun-noun homonyms. In Experiment 1, auditory lexical decision was fastest for unambiguous words, slower for noun-verb homonyms, and slowest for noun-noun homonyms. In Experiment 2, response times for matching spoken words to pictures followed the same pattern and eye fixation time courses revealed converging, gradual time course differences between conditions. These results indicate greater competition between meanings of ambiguous words when the meanings are from the same grammatical class (noun-noun homonyms) than they when are from different grammatical classes (noun-verb homonyms).

For lexical-gustatory synaesthetes, words trigger automatic, associated food sensations (e.g., for JB, the word slope tastes of over-ripe melon). Our study tests two claims about this unusual condition: that synaesthetic tastes are associated with abstract levels of word representation (concepts/lemmas), and that the first tastes to crystallise in early development are those triggered by food-names (e.g., apple tastes of apple; Simner & Ward, 2006). This concept/lemma-based proposal is difficult to immediately reconcile with the finding that non-words may also generate tastes (Ward, Simner, & Auyeung, 2005), since non-words have no concept/lemma representations. We manipulated the characteristics of non-words to provide three types of evidence that non-word tastes in fact stem from real word neighbours: Non-words with neighbours (e.g., keach) are more likely to generate tastes than those with no neighbours (e.g., vilps); pseudo-homophone non-words that are orthographically close to real words (e.g., peeple) are more likely to generate tastes than those that are more distant (baybee); and finally, the tastes of non-words are less consistent, and less intense, than those of real words. Additionally, we test the hypothesis that synaesthetic tastes develop initially from food-names by showing that non-words are more intensely flavoured if they are homophonic with food-names (e.g., toffie) versus non-foods (e.g., peeple). From this we conclude that synaesthetic tastes develop from food-names, and that tasty non-words do not challenge a concept/lemma-based account of lexical-gustatory synaesthesia.

Individuals with surface dyslexia read via grapheme-to-phoneme conversion due to a deficit in the lexical route. A deficit in the lexical route can be caused by impairments at several different loci. In the current study we identify three subtypes of developmental surface dyslexia, each caused by impairment at a different locus on the lexical route, and each showing a different pattern of performance in various tasks. All three subtypes show the classical pattern of reading aloud, with regularizations and difficulty in reading words that have more than a single possible conversion to a phoneme string, but they differ in their performance in lexical decision and homophone comprehension. The first subtype, input surface dyslexia, results from a deficit to the orthographic input lexicon, and entails poor performance in lexical decision and comprehension tasks. The second subtype, orthographic lexicon output surface dyslexia, in which the orthographic input lexicon is accessible but its output to the phonological output lexicon and to the semantic system is impaired, allows normal lexical decision, but causes impaired comprehension of homophones. The third subtype, interlexical surface dyslexia, caused by a selective deficit in the connection between the orthographic input lexicon and the phonological output lexicon but with intact access from the orthographic input lexicon to the semantic system, allows normal performance in lexical decision and comprehension tasks. Seventeen Hebrew-speaking individuals with developmental surface dyslexia aged 10-43 participated in the study, eight of them showed the first pattern, three showed the second pattern, and six displayed the third pattern. Another result of the study pertains to the importance of the lexicality of the result of grapheme-to-phoneme conversion for each target word. Some words, when read via grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, can potentially be read as other words (such as "now" in English, which can be sounded as the word "know"), we term these words potentiophones. The results indicate that potentiophones yield the highest error rate in reading aloud for all the participants with surface dyslexia.

This paper investigates homophone naming performance in an individual with impaired word retrieval. The aim of the study is to investigate the status of homophone representations using treatment of homophone picture naming in aphasia. The focus of this paper is the representation of heterographic homophones (words which sound the same but are spelled differently, e.g., 'knight' vs. 'night'). Additionally, we replicate and expand previous findings regarding homographic homophones of Biedermann and Nickels (2008) in English and Biedermann et al. (2002), in German. Two theoretical positions about the mental representation of homophones are tested. First, do homophones - regardless of whether they are spelled the same or differently - share a phonological word form (e.g., Levelt et al., 1999; Dell, 1990)? Or second, do they have independent phonological word forms? (e.g., Caramazza et al., 2001; Miozzo and Caramazza, 2005)? In addition, might it be the case that homographic and heterographic homophones behave differently in word production reflecting different word form representations? These theoretical accounts are put to the test by looking at the generalisation of improvement following the treatment of homophone naming in aphasia, in particular, whether picture naming improves for both homophone meanings if only one is treated using a phonological cueing hierarchy. Treated and untreated homophones improved significantly, regardless of their spelling. Homographic and heterographic homophones showed the same pattern of generalisation. There was no generalisation for phonologically related controls. The pattern of generalisation extends our previous findings (Biedermann et al., 2002; Biedermann and Nickels, 2008) by showing evidence that heterographic homophones benefit to the same extent as homographic homophones. These results are interpreted as favouring a theory where both homographic and heterographic homophones share a single phonological representation. It is inferred that facilitation of naming takes place at the level of phonological representations, where orthography seems to have no influence.