The nature of the homophone density effect: an ERP study with Chinese spoken monosyllable homophones.

For spoken Chinese, there is an abundance of homophones. For example, the number of homophone mates ranges from 2 to 48 for about 75% Chinese monosyllables. The present study investigated the effect of homophone density using an auditory lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, participants responded more slowly to monosyllabic homophones with more homophone mates than those with fewer mates, showing a clear inhibitory homophone density effect. To understand whether this inhibitory effect could be attributed to the competition among multiple orthographic/semantic codes associated with a homophone, Experiment 2 examined neural correlates of the homophone density effect with event-related potentials (ERPs). Results suggest that ERP effects in the 600-800 ms time window correlating with homophone density reflects competition among a homophone's multiple semantic meanings as opposed to its multiple spellings.