The role of potential context in the recognition of isolated homophones

The paper is based on the experiment in which four types of Russian homophones were used. Subjects were exposed to isolated homophones and were instructed either to write them down or to make up phrases with the perceived wordforms. The results received from two groups of subjects demonstrate that not only wordform frequency and "type frequency", but also the number of possible contexts that a wordform can enter along with the frequency of these contexts do influence recognition of isolated homophones.