The homophone effect during visual word recognition in children: an fMRI study

Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to investigate the role of phonology in visual word recognition (VWR). A group of children between the ages of 7 and 13 participated in a lexical decision task in which lexical frequency and homophony were manipulated. A significant homophone effect was observed for the high-frequency condition, indicating that phonology does indeed play a significant role in VWR. The brain activation patterns also support this idea in that regions that have been linked to phonological processing, the inferior frontal gyrus and the inferior parietal lobe, also revealed a homophone effect. Additionally, the posterior superior temporal cortex showed a homophone effect; however, this activation is argued to be related to lexical competition generated by the high-frequency homophone via the activation of multiple semantic representations.