The homophone effect in semantic access tasks using kanji words: its relation to the articulatory suppression effect

The present study examined whether articulatory suppression influences homophone effects in semantic access tasks using Japanese kanji words. In Experiment 1, participants were required to decide whether visually presented word pairs were synonyms. This experiment replicated the homophone effect observed in previous research that showed more false positive errors in response to nonsynonym homophone pairs than to controls. The present study found that this homophone effect was also obtained under an articulatory suppression condition. In Experiment 2, participants performed a semantic decision task, in which they had to judge whether a visually presented target word was an exemplar of a definition that was shown immediately before presentation of the target word. The homophone effect observed in previous studies was replicated--that is, longer response times and more false positive errors were associated with homophones of correct exemplars than with nonhomophone control words. This homophone effect was also obtained under an articulatory suppression conditions. These results suggest that the phonological processing that produces the homophone effects in semantic access tasks using Japanese kanji words does not include articulatory mechanisms.