Two bee oar knot too be: the effects of orthography and bilingualism on spoken homophone production

Abstract

The distinct meanings and shared phonology of pairs of homophones (e.g. night, knight) are useful tools for investigating lexical retrieval. However, there is inconsistency in previous research as to whether an advantage is found for homophones relative to non-homophones in spoken production. We investigated the effect of three potential confounding factors in the previous literature by asking participants to name and translate homophones and matched non-homophone control words: (i) speaker type (monolingual/bilingual participants); (ii) homophone spelling (heterographic/homographic) and (iii) task (picture naming/translation). Previous inconsistences were not due to speaker type or homophone spelling. We found a slight advantage for homophones; however, this was modulated by task. It remains unclear whether this effect differs with homophone spelling. In combination with previous research, we suggest that an Interactive activation model with competition between lexical nodes is the most plausible model of spoken word production.