Abstract
To what extent is handwritten word production based on phonological codes? A few studies conducted in Western languages have recently provided evidence showing that phonology contributes to the retrieval of graphemic properties in written output tasks. Less is known about how orthographic production works in languages with non-alphabetic scripts such as written Chinese. We report a Stroop study in which Chinese participants wrote the color of characters on a digital graphic tablet; characters were either neutral, or homophonic to the target (congruent), or homophonic to an alternative (incongruent). Facilitation was found from congruent homophonic distractors, but only when the homophone shared the same tone with the target. This finding suggests a contribution of phonology to written word production. A second experiment served as a control experiment to exclude the possibility that the effect in Experiment 1 had an exclusively semantic locus. Overall, the findings offer new insight into the relative contribution of phonology to handwriting, particularly in non-Western languages.
Highlights
How is the spelling of words mentally represented? Over the last few decades, this issue has attracted substantial attention in psycholinguistic research
The results showed that writing latencies on color naming were slower for incongruent trials relative to neutral control trials at all three stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), and this was the case irrespective of whether or not characters and color names shared the tone
This interference effect likely reflects the fact that in the incongruent conditions, Chinese writers activated the phonological information of the character and co-activated an incongruent color name via shared phonology, creating a conflict with the selection of the to-be-written color response
Summary
How is the spelling of words mentally represented? Over the last few decades, this issue has attracted substantial attention in psycholinguistic research. In other words, when an individual produces orthographic output, she first translates meaning into inner speech, and this phonological code is transformed into orthographic representations This view is in line with the observation that spoken language precedes written production ontogenetically and phylogenetically (e.g., Scinto, 1986). It fits most individuals’ introspection about how writing is achieved (Hotopf, 1980), and it accounts for spelling and typing errors such as homophone substitutions (e.g., there spelled as “their”) and production of phonologically plausible non-words (e.g., dearth spelled as “dirth”; Aitchison and Todd, 1982)
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