Abstract
Homographs and homophones have interesting linguistic properties that make them useful in many experiments involving language. To assist researchers in the elicitation of homophones, this paper presents a set of 93 line-drawn pictures of objects with homophonic names and a set of 108 questions with homophonic answers. Statistics are also included for each picture and question: Picture statistics include name-agreement percentages, dominance, and frequency statistics of depicted referents, and picture-naming latencies both with and without study of the picture names. For questions, statistics include answer-agreement percentages, difficulty ratings, dominance, frequency statistics, and naming latencies for 60 of the most consistently answered questions.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Balota, D. A., &Duchek, J. M. (1991). Semantic priming effects, lexical repetition effects, and contextual disambiguation effects in healthy aged individuals and individuals with senile dementia of the Alzheimer type.Brain & Language,40, 181–201.
Bock, K. (1996). Language production: Methods and methodologies.Psychonomic Bulletin & Review,3, 395–421.
Clare, L., McKenna, P. J., Mortimer, A. M., &Baddeley, A. D. (1993). Memory in schizophrenia: What is impaired and what is preserved?Neuropsychologia,31, 1225–1241.
Cohen, J., MacWhinney, B., Flatt, M., &Provost, J. (1993). PsyScope: An interactive graphic system for designing and controlling experiments in the psychology laboratory using Macintosh computers.Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers,25, 257–271.
Cutting, J. C., &Ferreira, V. S. (1996).Semantic and phonological information flow in the production lexicon. Manuscript submitted for publication.
Dell, G. S. (1990). Effects of frequency and vocabulary type on phonological speech errors.Language & Cognitive Processes,5, 313–349.
Doctor, E. A., &Coltheart, M. (1980). Children’s use of phonological encoding when reading for meaning.Memory & Cognition,8, 195–209.
Francis, W. N., &Kučera, H. (1982).Frequency analysis of English usage: Lexicon and grammar. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin.
Gilhooly, K. J., &Logie, R. H. (1980). Meaning-dependent ratings of imagery, age of acquisition, familiarity, and concreteness for 387 ambiguous words.Behavior Research Methods & Instrumentation,12, 428–450.
Griffin, Z. M. (1995).The locus of the word frequency effect in language production. Paper presented at the Sixty-Seventh Annual Meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, Chicago.
Griffin, Z. M. (1997).Spoken word frequency ratings for homophones. Manuscript submitted for publication.
Jescheniak, J. D., &Levelt, W. J. M. (1994). Word frequency effects in speech production: Retrieval of syntactic information and of phonological form.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition,20, 824–843.
McClelland, J. L. (1979). On the time relations of mental processes: An examination of systems of processes in cascade.Psychological Review,86, 287–330.
McRae, K., Jared, D., &Seidenberg, M. S. (1990). On the roles of frequency and lexical access in word naming.Journal of Memory & Language,29, 43–65.
Pollatsek, A., Lesch, M., Morris, R. K., &Rayner, K. (1992). Phonological codes are used in integrating information across saccades in word identification and reading.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance,18, 148–162.
Saffran, E. M.,Schwartz, M. F.,Linebarger, M.,Martin, N., &Bochetto, P. (1988).Philadelphia comprehension battery. Unpublished test battery.
Simpson, G. B., &Krueger, M. A. (1991). Selective access of homograph meanings in sentence context.Journal of Memory & Language,30, 627–643.
Snodgrass, J. G., &Vanderwart, M. (1980). A standardized set of 260 pictures: Norms for name agreement, image agreement, familiarity, and visual complexity.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning & Memory,6, 174–215.
Swinney, D. A. (1979). Lexical access during sentence comprehension: (Re)consideration of context effects.Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior,18, 645–659.
Tanenhaus, M. K., Leiman, J. M., &Seidenberg, M. S. (1979). Evidence for multiple stages in the processing of ambiguous words in syntactic contexts.Journal of Verbal Learning & Verbal Behavior,18, 427–440.
Twilley, L. C., Dixon, P., Taylor, D., &Clark, K. (1994). University of Alberta norms of relative meaning frequency for 566 homographs.Memory & Cognition,22, 111–126.
Waters, G. S., Caplan, D., &Leonard, C. (1992). The role of phonology and reading comprehension: Implications of the effects of homophones on processing sentences with referentially dependent categories.Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology,44A, 343–372.
Wheeldon, L. R., &Monsell, S. (1994). Inhibition of spoken word production by priming a semantic competitor.Journal of Memory & Language,33, 332–356.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This research was supported by National Science Foundation Grants SBR 93-19368 to Gary S. Dell and SBR 94-11627 to Kay Bock, and National Institutes of Health Grant R01-HD-21011 to Kay Bock. The first author was supported by a Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (Canada) Postgraduate Scholarship. The authors thank Kay Bock, Gary Dell, Peter Dixon, Zenzi Griffin, John Huitema, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on early versions of this manuscript, Danielle Holthaus and Zenzi Griffin for help collecting data, Evan Pritchard for recording the question stimuli for presentation, and Gay Snodgrass for allowing us to reproduce the Snodgrass and Vanderwart (1980) pictures. To receive digital versions of the picture stimuli, a blank formatted floppy disk (PC or Macintosh) should be sent to either preceding address. The pictures (except for the Snodgrass & Vanderwart, 1980, pictures) can also be retrieved from http://dasparc.cogsci.uiuc.edu/∼jcutting/homophones.html.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Ferreira, V.S., Cutting, J.C. Ninety-three pictures and 108 questions for the elicitation of homophones. Behavior Research Methods, Instruments, & Computers 29, 619–635 (1997). https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03210616
Received:
Accepted:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03210616