Pseudo‐homophony in non‐native listening

Pseudo‐homophony may result when non‐native listeners cannot distinguish phonemic contrasts. Thus Dutch listeners have difficulty distinguishing the vowels of English cattle versus kettle, because this contrast is subsumed by a single Dutch vowel category; in consequence, both words may be activated whenever either is heard. A lexical decision study in English explored this phenomenon by testing for repetition priming. The materials contained among 340 items 18 pairs such as cattle/kettle, i.e., contrasting only in those vowels, and 18 pairs contrasting only in r/l (e.g., right/light). These materials, spoken by a native American English speaker, were presented to fluent non‐native speakers of English, 48 Dutch Nijmegen University students, and 48 Japanese Dokkyo University students; the listeners performed lexical decision on each spoken item, and response time was measured. Dutch listeners responded significantly faster to one member of a cattle/kettle pair after having heard the other member earlier in the list (compared with having heard a control word), suggesting that both words had been activated whichever had been heard. Japanese listeners, however, showed no such priming for cattle/kettle words, but did show repetition priming across r/l pairs such as right/light. Non‐native listeners’ phonemic discrimination difficulties thus generate pseudo‐homophony.