Is handwriting constrained by phonology? Evidence from Stroop tasks with written responses and Chinese characters

Abstract

To what extent is handwritten word production based on phonological codes? A few studies conducted in Western languages have recently provided evidence showing that phonology contributes to the retrieval of graphemic properties in written output tasks. Less is known about how orthographic production works in languages with non-alphabetic scripts such as written Chinese. We report a Stroop study in which Chinese participants wrote the color of characters on a digital graphic tablet; characters were either neutral, or homophonic to the target (congruent), or homophonic to an alternative (incongruent). Facilitation was found from congruent homophonic distractors, but only when the homophone shared the same tone with the target. This finding suggests a contribution of phonology to written word production. A second experiment served as a control experiment to exclude the possibility that the effect in Experiment 1 had an exclusively semantic locus. Overall, the findings offer new insight into the relative contribution of phonology to handwriting, particularly in non-Western languages.

Phonology contributes to writing: evidence from a masked priming task

“…Results from written forms of the classic Stroop task (Damian & Qu, 2013) also converge with the inference that phonological properties of responses are relevant when written words are produced. Other experimental tasks which have been employed to investigate the issue involve object naming with a manipulation of the object names' sound-to-spelling consistency (Bonin, Peereman, & Fayol, 2001) and cross-modal long-lasting repetition priming (Damian, Dorjee, & StadthagenGonzalez, 2011).…”

Introduction to the special issue on the dynamics of written word production: methods, models and processing units

“…If this assumption is obvious for high-level processes related to text writing, then for handwriting, it is possible that processes are too automatized. To test this hypothesis, studies can investigate either (1) the impact of spelling complexity on handwriting by comparing, for example, regular and irregular word spelling (Delattre et al, 2006;Roux et al, 2013) or the influence of phonological processing on writing (Damian & Qu, 2013, Zhang & Damian, 2010 or (2) the impact of the constraints of handwriting (e.g., letter case) on spelling performance (e.g., Sausset, Lambert, Olive, & Larocque, 2012).…”

Phonology is not accessed earlier than orthography in Chinese written production: evidence for the orthography autonomy hypothesis

“…However, less work has been devoted to understanding written production. The current views of speech production provide a general theoretical framework from which hypotheses specific to writing can be derived ( Bonin et al, 1997 , 1998a , b , 2013 ; Rapp et al, 1997 ; Bonin and Fayol, 2000 ; Baus et al, 2013 ; Damian and Qu, 2013 ; Zhang and Wang, 2014 ). In the work reported here, we investigated how orthographic codes are accessed from the conceptual/semantic level in writing using a picture–word interference (PWI) paradigm, which is an experimental paradigm that is popular in speech production (i.e., Schriefers et al, 1990 ; Starreveld and La Heij, 1995 , 1996a , b ; Damian and Martin, 1999 ).…”