The Effect of Visually and Phonologically Misleading Nonwords on Lexical Decisions of Native Japanese Readers

Native Japanese readers were found to rely heavily on visual codes and scarcely on phonological codes in letter/word processing (Mizuno, Matsui, & Bellezza, 2007). This study aimed to determine if this processing feature of native Japanese readers influenced their process of lexical access by lexical decision tasks using visually misleading transposedletter (TL) nonwords, phonologically misleading pseudohomophones, and standard nonwords. Lupker and Pexman (2010) found that the performance on a lexical decision task of native English readers was impaired by both TL nonwords and pseudohomophones. However, the results of two experiments in this study showed that the performance of native Japanese readers was impaired not by pseudohomophones but by TL nonwords. The results suggested that the processing features of native readers of various languages should influence their process of lexical access.