Abstract
In the present study subjects were required to make lexical decisions on words with either regular or irregular spelling-to-sound correspondence. This task was performed in one of two types of nonword environment: the NW condition, in which all the nonwords were orthographically regular but not pseudohomophones, and the PS condition in which 50% of the nonwords were pseudohomophones. The data showed that irregular words were more difficult to identify than regular words but that the extent of this difference did not vary across the two nonword environments. In addition, lexical decision latencies to pseudohomophones, although initially much longer than those to normal nonwords, were found to decrease in size across the experiment to a point at which they did not differ from normal nonwords. The data are discussed in relation to other studies that have suggested that phonological recoding is under strategic control and will be abandoned when such encoding is disadvantageous. In addition, the general nature of pseudohomophone effects is briefly considered.
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