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

Abstract

Three sets of experiments using the picture naming tasks with the form preparation paradigm investigated the influence of orthographic experience on the development of phonological preparation unit in spoken word production in native Mandarin-speaking children. Participants included kindergarten children who have not received formal literacy instruction, Grade 1 children who are comparatively more exposed to the alphabetic pinyin system and have very limited Chinese character knowledge, Grades 2 and 4 children who have better character knowledge and more exposure to characters, and skilled adult readers who have the most advanced character knowledge and most exposure to characters. Only Grade 1 children showed the form preparation effect in the same initial consonant condition (i.e., when a list of target words shared the initial consonant). Both Grade 4 children and adults showed the preparation effect when the initial syllable (but not tone) among target words was shared. Kindergartners and Grade 2 children only showed the preparation effect when the initial syllable including tonal information was shared. These developmental changes in phonological preparation could be interpreted as a joint function of the modification of phonological representation and attentional shift. Extensive pinyin experience encourages speakers to attend to and select onset phoneme in phonological preparation, whereas extensive character experience encourages speakers to prepare spoken words in syllables.

Orthography and speech production in children with good or poor reading skills

“…Another possibility is that the children's exposure to the orthography was not enough to produce the effect of orthographic interference. This possibility follows the results of Li and Wang (2017), who indicate that long-term exposure to certain orthographic types (in this case, Chinese character knowledge vs. the alphabetic Pinyin system; children's formal literacy instruction includes instruction in both systems during specific years of their education) influences children's production. These different views should be explored in future works on this issue.…”

“…These authors conclude that in Pinyin, phonological encoding occurs in a smaller unit, whereas in Chinese characters, phonological encoding occurs in a larger unit. Li and Wang (2017) demonstrated a similar effect in native Mandarin-speaking children, indicating that extensive experience with Chinese characters or with Pinyin influences these speakers' phonological representations.…”

Phonological network fluency identifies phonological restructuring through mental search

“…The connection between phonology and orthography in a recent study implementing a picture-naming form preparation task more firmly places the proximate unit within the realm of literacy acquisition. Kindergartners, who were learning via pinyin, showed onset effects, grade 1 and grade 2 students tonal syllable effects, while grade 4 students and adults, in line with the proximate unit principle, revealed atonal syllable effects 31 .…”

“…In the current study we asked if variation in phonological representations of Mandarin-speaking participants, elicited through a novel verbal fluency task, would inform on the question of segmentation in speech production. Mixed results in speech production studies, and evidence of segmentation among both speakers of high English fluency 65 , and young participants learning through pinyin 31 , led us to hypothesize that differential results would arise due to biases towards either segmental or syllable-driven search through the mental lexicon. We further hypothesized that these search methods would be due to the influence of our participants’ language backgrounds, namely, their self-reported English proficiency (English), number of other Chinese languages/dialects spoken (Num_Chinese), and the number of languages spoken with native-level proficiency (Multilingual).…”

Remediation of a phonological representation deficit in Chinese children with dyslexia: A comparison between metalinguistic training and working memory training

“…Chinese form-preparation studies have investigated the role of syllables irrespective of tone in spoken word production (e.g. Chen et al, 2002;Li & Wang, 2017;O'Seaghdha et al, 2010;Wong et al, 2012). As a tone language, Chinese lexical items can share the same consonant-vowel sequence but differ only in pitch pattern (e.g., 情 /cing4/ and 清 /cing1/ carry different tone; the number after a syllable indicates tone).…”