Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 2001, Vol. 27, No. 6, 1430-1450 Copyright 2001 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. 0278-7393/O1/S5.O0 DOI: 10.1037//0278-7393.27.6.1430 The Specific-Word Frequency Effect: Implications for the Representation of Homophones in Speech Production Alfonso Caramazza and Albert Costa Harvard University Michele Miozzo Columbia University Yanchao Bi Harvard University In a series of experiments, the authors investigated whether naming latencies for homophones (e.g., /nAn/) are a function of specific-word frequency (i.e., the frequency of nun) or a function of cumulative- homophone frequency (i.e., the sum of the frequencies of nun and none). Specific-word but not cumulative-homophone frequency affected picture-naming latencies. This result was obtained in 2 languages (English and Chinese). An analogous finding was obtained in a translation task, where bilingual speakers produced the English names of visually presented Spanish words. Control experiments ruled out that these results are an artifact of orthographic or articulatory factors, or of visual recognition. The results argue against the hypothesis that homophones share a common word-form representation, and support instead a model in which homophones have fully independent representations. Homophones are words that have the same pronunciation but differ in meaning, spelling, or grammatical class. How are homo- phones represented and accessed in speech production? Two hy- potheses have been proposed. One view holds that homophones share a common lexical-phonological representation, but because they have different meanings and often also different grammatical properties (e.g., sun/son; the watch/to watch; him/hymn), they have different semantic and lexical-grammatical representations (Cut- ting & Ferreira, 1999; Dell, 1990; Jescheniak & Levelt, 1994; Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999). 1 We refer to models of this type as shared representation (SR) models. There are four levels of representation in these models: semantic/conceptual nodes, lemma nodes, lexeme nodes, and phonological nodes. Lemmas specify the word's grammatical properties, whereas lexemes specify their phonological contents. Figure 1A schematically represents this Alfonso Caramazza, Albert Costa, and Yanchao Bi, Department of Psychology, Harvard University; Michele Miozzo, Department of Psychol- ogy, Columbia University. The work reported here was supported in part by National Institutes of Health Grants NS22201 and DC0452 awarded to Alfonso Caramazza. Albert Costa was supported by a Fulbright Fellowship from the Spanish Government; Michele Miozzo was supported by a start-up grant from Columbia University and a Keck Foundation grant. We thank Dr. Hua Shu for her assistance in the experiments conducted in Beijing, China. We thank Dr. Nuria Sebastian for her assistance in the experiments conducted in Barcelona, Spain. We thank Delia Kong, Jie Zhuang, and Elena Tenconi for their help in participant testing. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Alfonso Caramazza, Cognitive Neuropsychology Laboratory, Department of Psy- chology, William James Hall, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138. Electronic mail may be sent to caram@wjh.harvard.edu. hypothesis. The alternative hypothesis attributes no special status to homophones. Each word, homophonic and nonhomophonic, is represented independently (Caramazza, 1997; Harley, 1999). We refer to models of this type as independent representation (IR) models. One such proposal is schematically represented in Figure IB. Here there are only three levels of representation in lexical access: semantic/conceptual nodes, lexical nodes, and phonologi- cal nodes. The results of two recent studies have been interpreted as providing support for the SR hypothesis (Dell, 1990; Jescheniak & Levelt, 1994). In both studies, the authors investigated the effects of homophone frequency on naming performance. Given the as- sumption that homophones share a common representation, the effective frequency of the homophone word form would be the sum of the frequencies of the homophonic words. For example, the frequency of the word form /nAn/ would be the sum of the frequencies of the homophonic words nun and none. We refer to this property of homophones as cumulative-homophone frequency; the term specific-word frequency will be used to refer to the frequency of individual words (nun or none). Jescheniak and Levelt (1994) reasoned that if word frequency were to affect the retrieval of word forms in production, a clear prediction would follow from the SR hypothesis: The retrieval of homophonic words should be determined by cumulative-homophone frequency 1 Note that whether homophonic words are homographic (the watch/to watch) or heterographic (him/hymn) has not been considered to be a relevant factor in theories of lexical access in speech production. Never- theless, below we will consider the possible role of orthographic form in theories of phonological lexical access. 1430