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The Effect of Visually and Phonologically Misleading Nonwords on Lexical Decisions of Native Japanese Readers

The Effect of Visually and Phonologically Misleading Nonwords on Lexical Decisions of Native Japanese Readers Rika Mizuno (mizunor@isc.chubu.ac.jp) Takao Matsui (mat@psy.chubu.ac.jp) Department of Psychology, Chubu University 1200 Matsumoto-Cho, Kasugai-shi, 487-8501 JAPAN Abstract Native Japanese readers were found to rely heavily on visual codes and scarcely on phonological codes in letter/word processing (Mizuno, Matsui, & Bellezza, 2007). This study aimed to determine if this processing feature of native Japanese readers influenced their process of lexical access by lexical decision tasks using visually misleading transposed- letter (TL) nonwords, phonologically misleading pseudohomophones, and standard nonwords. Lupker and Pexman (2010) found that the performance on a lexical decision task of native English readers was impaired by both TL nonwords and pseudohomophones. However, the results of two experiments in this study showed that the performance of native Japanese readers was impaired not by pseudohomophones but by TL nonwords. The results suggested that the processing features of native readers of various languages should influence their process of lexical access. Keywords: lexical decision; nonwords; transposed-letter; pseudohomophone; native Japanese readers; native English readers Introduction A lexical decision task (Meyer & Schvaneveldt, 1971) is a task in which participants decide whether presented letter strings are words or not. The lexical decision time of a word is considered to reflect the access time to lexical representation of the word, and the task has been used in many studies to explore the structure of lexical representation or the process of lexical access. Various features of words have been found to influence lexical decision time. Such features include word frequency (e.g., Glanzer & Ehrenreich, 1979), neighborhood size 1 (Coltheart, Develaar, Jonasson, & Besner, 1977), semantic relation to primes (Neely, 1977), spelling-to-sound regularity (Parkin, 1982), and so on. However, some research has shown that the effects of the features of nonwords on lexical decision time are also not negligible. For example, Shulman and Davidson (1977) found that pronounceable nonwords delayed the lexical decision time of words more than unpronounceable nonwords. Perea and Lupker (2004) found that the transposed-letter (TL) nonwords, which were made by transposing the two letters of words, delayed the lexical decision time for both words and nonwords. Lupker and Pexman (2011) compared the size of frequency effect in the TL, pseudohomophone, and standard nonword conditions. Frequency effect means that the lexical decision time of The number of words that can be created by changing one letter while maintaining letter positions. more frequent words is shorter. They found that lexical decision time was longer and that frequency effect was greater in the TL and the pseudohomophone nonword conditions than in the standard nonword condition. These findings about the effects of nonwords on lexical decision time not only contributed to the improved understanding of the process of lexical access but suggested that the features of nonwords should also be considered in using lexical decision tasks. As described above, visually misleading TL nonwords and phonologically misleading pseudohomophones were confirmed to influence lexical decision time of words and nonwords. However, they were confirmed only with native English readers. Mizuno, Matsui, and Bellezza (2007) and Mizuno, Matsui, Harman, and Bellezza (2008) conducted several letter-matching experiments with native English and native Japanese readers, and found that native Japanese readers rely heavily on visual codes and not as much on phonological codes as native English readers do. Mizuno and Matsui (2012) also showed that visual similarity, rather than phonological similarity, between targets and distracters increased attentional blink of native Japanese readers, while Chun and Potter (1995) suggested that phonological similarity had a significant effect on the attentional blink of native English readers. Consequently, we hypothesized that performance on a lexical decision task by native Japanese readers would not be impaired by phonologically misleading pseudohomophones because they rely scarcely on phonological codes. If this is verified, we will be able to not only indicate that their processing features of letters influence performance on lexical decision tasks but also alert many researchers using lexical decision tasks to take the processing features of their participants into account in choosing nonwords. Experiment 1 Experiment 1 compared lexical decision time and error rates of native Japanese readers across the TL nonword condition, the pseudohomophone condition, and the standard nonword condition. We predicted that their lexical decision time would be delayed and error rates for nonwords would be high only in the TL condition, and not in the pseudohomophone condition and the standard condition. Method Participants and Design Thirty-six undergraduate students (14 women and 22 men) who were native Japanese