Orthographic properties of distractors do influence phonological Stroop effects: Evidence from Japanese Romaji distractors

Abstract

In attempting to understand mental processes, it is important to use a task that appropriately reflects the underlying processes being investigated. Recently, Verdonschot and Kinoshita (Memory & Cognition, 46, 410-425, 2018) proposed that a variant of the Stroop task-the "phonological Stroop task"-might be a suitable tool for investigating speech production. The major advantage of this task is that the task is apparently not affected by the orthographic properties of the stimuli, unlike other, commonly used, tasks (e.g., associative-cuing and word-reading tasks). The viability of this proposal was examined in the present experiments by manipulating the script types of Japanese distractors. For Romaji distractors (e.g., "kushi"), colornaming responses were faster when the initial phoneme was shared between the color name and the distractor than when the initial phonemes were different, thereby showing a phoneme-based phonological Stroop effect (Experiment 1). In contrast, no such effect was observed when the same distractors were presented in Katakana (e.g., "くし"), replicating Verdonschot and Kinoshita's original results (Experiment 2). A phoneme-based effect was again found when the Katakana distractors used in Verdonschot and Kinoshita's original study were transcribed and presented in Romaji (Experiment 3). Because the observation of a phonemic effect directly depended on the orthographic properties of the distractor stimuli, we conclude that the phonological Stroop task is also susceptible to orthographic influences.

Phonological encoding in Vietnamese: An experimental investigation

“…Although it was pointed out earlier that Verdonschot and Kinoshita (2018) advocated the phonological Stroop task as a viable alternative for masked priming as there was “no intention to read the word” others have questioned this task’s suitability ( Yoshihara et al, 2021 ). Particularly, in Verdonschot & Kinoshita’s work the script was moraic (katakana) or morphemic (kanji) and never alphabetic like in the current experiment (see onset effects for Japanese written in alphabetic romaji in Yoshihara et al, 2021 ).…”

“…Although it was pointed out earlier that Verdonschot and Kinoshita (2018) advocated the phonological Stroop task as a viable alternative for masked priming as there was “no intention to read the word” others have questioned this task’s suitability ( Yoshihara et al, 2021 ). Particularly, in Verdonschot & Kinoshita’s work the script was moraic (katakana) or morphemic (kanji) and never alphabetic like in the current experiment (see onset effects for Japanese written in alphabetic romaji in Yoshihara et al, 2021 ). In addition, although no participant mentioned noticing this, it is still possible that our colour names may have been cued by the onset (and/or the following segments) of the visible nonwords enabling faster retrieval of the congruent colour names.…”

“…Therefore, to further investigate phonological encoding in Vietnamese we also employed a Phonological Stroop paradigm. It has been argued earlier (Verdonschot & Kinoshita, 2018; but see Yoshihara et al, 2021 for a different view) that there are two (not mutually contradictory) possibilities. The first is that, through prolonged experience, the script's grain size, which is used to write the language (i.e., whether each character maps onto a phoneme, mora, or syllable), affects the phonological unit employed by the language user.…”

“…However, Yoshihara et al (2021) recently showed that using romaji (i.e., Romanized Japanese) naming responses were also faster when the initial phoneme was shared between the colour name and the distractor (e.g., the "k" in "kasa" [umbrella] significantly speeded up naming yellow "kiiro" in Japanese) indicating an effect of phonological grain size a particular distractor maps onto. One thing which the results from Verdonschot and Kinoshita (2018) and Yoshihara et al (2017Yoshihara et al ( , 2021 make clear is that it is worthwhile to investigate language/ script combinations in which the script does not reflect the size of the underlying fundamental phonological unit (i.e., such as Japanese kanji which reflect morpho-syllables instead of moras). However, such combinations are extremely rare as typically the script which coexists with a language naturally reflects the size of the fundamental underlying phonological unit.…”

“…They argued that when the task “does not necessarily involve reading” (like in Yoshihara et al, 2017 ) it might not exert an influence and they consequently used a Stroop colour naming task in which both moraic hiragana (e.g., みせ / mi .se/) and morphemic kanji (e.g., 店 / mi .se/ “shop”) overlapped with a to-be-named colour (e.g., / mi dori/ “green”) and facilitatory mora effects appeared both for katakana and kanji words. However, Yoshihara et al (2021) recently showed that using romaji (i.e., Romanized Japanese) naming responses were also faster when the initial phoneme was shared between the colour name and the distractor (e.g., the “k” in “kasa” [umbrella] significantly speeded up naming yellow “kiiro” in Japanese) indicating an effect of phonological grain size a particular distractor maps onto. One thing which the results from Verdonschot and Kinoshita (2018) and Yoshihara et al (2017 , 2021 ) make clear is that it is worthwhile to investigate language/script combinations in which the script does not reflect the size of the underlying fundamental phonological unit (i.e., such as Japanese kanji which reflect morpho-syllables instead of moras).…”