Pseudohomophones and word recognition

Pseudohomophones play an important role in visual word recognition research, but they are not often themselves the object of experimental inquiry. In Experiment 1, we explored whether the status of body rime relations in pseudohomophones-whether their body rime relations exist in actual words-predicts the likelihood of word pronunciations to pseudohomophone spellings. In Experiment 2, we tested whether extant body rime relations modulate performance to pseudohomophones, and their context effect on word trials, in a lexical decision task. Extant body rime relations increase the likelihood that a pseudohomophone will be given a word pronunciation, and they produce slower and more error prone performance to pseudohomophones and words in lexical decision.