Phonological access to the mental lexicon in a target discrimination task.

A phonological route to the mental lexicon was demonstrated in two experiments. Each involved a target discrimination task in which the target was the first or last letter of a quadrigram. Half the quadrigrams were pseudohomophones (identical in sound but not in spelling to an English word) and the other half were nonhomophones (pronounceable but neither spelled like nor sounding like any English word). In Experiment 1 each pseudohomophone had a nonhomophone counterpart produced by changing only the letter on the opposite end of the string from the target. In Experiment 2 the nonhomophone counterparts were produced by changing only the letter next to the one on the opposite end of the string from the target; thus the extreme letters were the same for both types of quadrigrams. Performance was significantly better on pseudohomophones than on nonhomophones in both experiments.