The Nature of the Sound Codes Accessed by Visual Language

Abstract The nature of the sound codes accessed by visual words was explored in four experiments. Experiments 1 and 2 employed a homophony judgment task and Experiments 3 and 4 employed a lexical decision task. Experiments 1 and 3 compared phonetic pseudohomophones (phonetic PHs) such as nootle to various controls including phonemic PHs such as speek. Phonemic PHs were more easily judged as sounding like words than phonetic PHs, but other comparisons indicated that both phonetic and phonemic codes were involved in homophony judgments. In contrast, only phonetic codes were clearly implicated in the lexical decision task. Experiments 2 and 4 compared PHs whose morphemic complexity mismatched the baseword (e.g., counce ) to PHs whose morphemic complexity matched the baseword (e.g., discloaz ). There was a clear effect of morphemic mismatching in the homophony judgment task, but little or no effect of morphemic mismatching in the lexical decision task. These data suggested that morphological structure is part of phonemic coding but not part of phonetic coding.