The effect of orthographic form-cuing on the phonological preparation unit in spoken word production

Abstract

Two experiments using the form-preparation paradigm were conducted to investigate the effect of orthographic form-cuing on the phonological preparation unit during spoken word production with native Mandarin speakers. In both experiments, participants were instructed to memorize nine prompt-response monosyllabic word pairs, after which an associative naming session was conducted in which the prompts were presented and participants were asked to say the corresponding response names as quickly and accurately as possible. In both experiments, the response words in the homogeneous lists shared the same onsets, or shared the same rimes; the response names had no common aspects of pronunciation in the heterogeneous lists. Chinese characters (Experiment 1) and Pinyin (phonetic transcription of the characters) (Experiment 2) were used to investigate the effect of the orthographic form. Significant onset facilitation and rime inhibition was shown for Pinyin syllables but not for characters. The contrasts of the onset and rime effect in the two orthographic forms suggest that a specific phonological unit is promoted in spoken word production in a certain orthographic form. Pinyin cued the participants to prepare the onset whereas Chinese characters did not. The rime interference effect may arise as a result of lexical competition in spoken word production.

Of Papers and Pens: Polysemes and Homophones in Lexical (mis)Selection

“…Given evidence that activation proceeds from orthographic units to lexical units in word production (e.g., Li, Wang, & Idsardi, 2015), a worthwhile direction for future research may be to investigate whether differences in the orthography of homophones' meanings affect the relative activation among lexical representations. The connection between a homophone's lemmas may be diminished if there are orthographic differences between the homophones' meanings (e.g., flour, flower), as was the case with some of the stimuli in this study.…”

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

“…It is relevant to note in this context that recently two separate studies have reported using the implicit priming task with alphabetic transcriptions of Chinese and Japanese words and showed the preparation effect with onset segment with (Mandarin) Chinese speakers and Japanese speakers. Li et al (2015) showed the preparation effect for onset segments when pinyin is used. Similarly, Kureta, Fushimi, Sakuma, and Tatsumi (2015) reported that when the response words were presented in romaji (romanized Japanese) in the promptresponse learning phase, the preparation benefit was found for the shared onset segments, and they concluded that Japanese speakers Bcan prepare phonemic segments in special circumstances in which the orthographic representation of romanized Japanese is first activated^(p. 50).…”

“…Note also that Kureta et al's (2015) finding is at odds with the absence of onset segment priming effect with romaji stimuli reported by Verdonschot et al (2011) with native Japanese speakers. Li et al (2015) also pointed out a caveat that their participants were all undergraduate or graduate students at an American university and had extensive exposure to English, and hence Btheir higher English language proficiency may have facilitated them to attend more to a small phonological unit such as the onset( p. 575). 3 In sum, although the two implicit priming studies show that in the implicit priming task Mandarin speakers and Japanese speakers can use the onset segments to prepare speech production when words are presented in alphabetic script, they do not speak to the key question at hand, namely, whether cross-language variation in the phonological unit used in speech production is due to the difference in native script type.…”

“…Li, Wang and Idsardi (2015) asked exactly this question and concluded in the affirmative, based on an implicit priming study with Mandarin Chinese speakers.Mem Cogn (2018) 46:410-425…”

The influence of orthographic experience on the development of phonological preparation in spoken word production

“…Previous research has investigated the preparation unit in adults from a number of perspectives, such as the influence of word properties (e.g., the influence of word length in Meyer, 1991), the flexibility of preparation unit within the same language (Kureta, Fushimi, Sakuma, & Tatsumi, 2014;C. Li, Wang, & Idsardi, 2015), the preparation unit across different languages (e.g., Kureta et al, 2006;O'Séaghdha et al, 2010), and the preparation unit in bilinguals (Ida et al, 2015;C.…”