Orthographic effects in spoken word recognition: Evidence from Chinese

Abstract

General rightsThis document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite only the published version using the reference above. Full terms of use are available: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/pure/about/ebr-terms Orthography in spoken word recognition 2 Abstract Extensive evidence from alphabetic languages demonstrates a role of orthography in the processing of spoken words. Because alphabetic systems explicitly code speech sounds, such effects are perhaps not surprising. However, it is less clear whether orthographic codes are involuntarily accessed from spoken words in languages with non-alphabetic systems, in which the sound-spelling correspondence is largely arbitrary. We investigated the role of orthography via a semantic relatedness judgment task: native Mandarin speakers judged whether or not spoken word pairs were related in meaning. Word pairs were either semantically related, orthographically related, or unrelated. Results showed that relatedness judgments were made faster for word pairs that were semantically related than for unrelated word pairs. Critically, orthographic overlap on semantically unrelated word pairs induced a significant increase in response latencies. These findings indicate that orthographic information is involuntarily accessed in spoken-word recognition, even in a nonalphabetic language such as Chinese.

Orthographic effects in second-language spoken-word recognition.

“…In conjunction with the earlier findings from Qu and Damian (2016), the present results suggest that spoken word processing is modulated by orthographic overlap in both L1 and L2 listeners. In processing terms, how exactly such effects come about remains at present speculative.…”

“…In the present study, we adopted an exclusively auditory task in which Tibetan-Chinese bilinguals were presented with two spoken Chinese words and judged whether the two words were related in meaning or not. On unrelated pairs, a subset were orthographically related, and as in a previous study which targeted native Chinese listeners (Qu & Damian, 2016), for L2 listeners in the current study orthographic overlap modulated response latencies. The finding constitutes clear evidence that orthography plays a role in second-language spoken comprehension.…”

“…The procedure was identical to Qu and Damian (2016). Stimuli were presented using E-Prime 1.1 software (Psychology Software Tools, Pittsburgh, PA).…”

“…In EEG, orthographic consistency, modulated the amplitude of N400, whereas homophone density modulated a late positive component (LPC). Finally, we (Qu & Damian, 2016) reported results from a semantic relatedness judgment task in which native Mandarin speakers judged whether or not spoken word pairs were related in meaning.…”

“…The present study was designed to address these issues. We used the same semantic judgement task featured in Qu and Damian (2016): participants were presented with two successive spoken Mandarin words ("prime" and "target"), and they were asked to judge via a key press response whether or not the two words were semantically related. Pairs were either semantically related, orthographically related, or unrelated, hence expected responses were "yes" for semantically related pairs, and "no" for orthographically related and unrelated pairs.…”