Individual Differences in the Activation of Phonological Information during L2 Visual Word Recognition

We examined the impact of near-homophones with phonetically similar non-native contrasts (‘bend’-‘band’) on lexical decision by Korean learners of English. Results indicated no effect of near-homophonic primes compared to orthographic controls (‘bond’), and less proficient learners showed a greater facilitative effect of both prime types than did more proficient learners.