Mora or more? The phonological unit of Japanese word production in the Stroop color naming task

Abstract

In English, Dutch, and other European languages, it is well established that the fundamental phonological unit in word production is the phoneme; in contrast, recent studies have shown that in Chinese it is the (atonal) syllable and in Japanese the mora. The present study investigated whether this cross-language variation in the size of the unit of word production is due to the type of script used in the language (i.e., alphabetic, morphosyllabic, or moraic). Capitalizing on the multiscriptal nature of Japanese, and using the Stroop color naming task, we show that the overlap in the initial mora between the color name and the written distractor facilitates color naming independent of script type. These results confirm the mora as the phonological unit of word production in Japanese, and establish the Stroop color naming task as a useful task for investigating the fundamental (or "proximate") phonological unit used in speech production.

Spoken-word production in Korean: A non-word masked priming and phonological Stroop task investigation

“…In addition, considering previously mentioned studies indicating diverging evidence concerning the role script plays in Japanese (e.g., Verdonschot & Kinoshita, 2017; Yoshihara et al, 2017), it seems to be essential to point out that several psycholinguistic studies using Korean have shown that either a syllable or a phoneme segment to serve as a phonologically relevant unit when processing Hangul words. For instance, Simpson and Kang (2004) examined whether the syllable had a special status when naming Korean words.…”

“…When, in a subsequent experiment, the stimuli were transcribed to kana (a moraic script), mora priming once again emerged. However, another study by Verdonschot and Kinoshita (2017) recently showed, using the phonological Stroop task (see Experiment 2 for more details), that mora effects can appear even with kanji (e.g., RTs are faster when 右 /mi.gi/ “ear” is written in green, which is /mi.do.ri/ in Japanese, than when its written in red, or /a.ka/ in Japanese). This contrasts Yoshihara et al’s (2017) findings and suggests that the Stroop task constitutes a more valid production task as the colour names are cued perceptually without any necessary involvement of script.…”

“…Chen et al, 2016; You et al, 2012)? and (3) What pattern does Korean Hangul, through its unique “alphabetic syllabary” nature, show if a task is used which does not necessitate reading of the target word (see Verdonschot & Kinoshita, 2017)?…”

The proximate unit in Korean speech production: Phoneme or syllable?

“…The syllable overlap effect was greater than the benefit due to the CV segment overlap. Their second experiment used the phonological Stroop task (see Coltheart et al, 1999; Verdonschot & Kinoshita, 2018) in which two-character Hangul non-words were presented in colour, and participants had to name the colour of the ink. The overlap between the colour name (e.g., /no.laŋ/ “yellow”) and the distractor was manipulated either at the segment level (C-overlap, for example, <낙문> /nak.mun/ vs. control <각문> /kak.mun/) or at the CV level (CV overlap, for example, <녹니> /nok.ni/ vs. control <악니> /ak.ni/).…”

“…The advantages of this task over the masked-priming read-aloud paradigm are twofold: first, the target is not a written word and hence it is less prone to the influence of orthography (see the results of Kinoshita & Mills, 2020; Kinoshita & Verdonschot, 2020, which suggest that the benefit of onset segment overlap in the PWI task is purely phonological, with no added benefit from orthographic overlap); second, the distractor is available for a longer period than masked primes (i.e., until the participant’s response), and hence there is a greater scope to observe effects of different sized units. 4 In these respects, the PWI task is similar to the Stroop colour-naming task, the task used previously to investigate the proximate unit in Japanese (Verdonschot & Kinoshita, 2018) and Korean (J. I. Han & Verdonschot, 2019).…”