It Is Not Necessary to Retrieve the Phonological Nodes of Context Objects for Chinese Speakers.

Qingfang Zhang,Xuebing Zhu

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01161

Abstract

The issue of how activation is transmitted from semantic to phonological level in spoken production remains controversial. Recent evidences from alphabetic languages support a cascaded view. However, given the different architecture of phonological encoding in non-alphabetic languages, it is not clear whether this view applies in Chinese, as a non-alphabetic script. We therefore investigated whether the not-to-be named pictures activate their phonological properties in Chinese speech production. In Experiment 1, participants were presented a target English word and a context picture (semantically related or unrelated, phonologically related or unrelated to target word in Chinese) and were asked to translate the English word into a Chinese word. The translation latencies were faster in the semantically related condition than in the unrelated condition. By contrast, no difference between phonologically related and unrelated was observed. In Experiment 2, in order to promote participants phonological sensitivity in a word-translation task, we increased the proportion of phonologically related trials from 25 to 50%. In Experiment 3, we employed a word association task that was more sensitive to phonological activation of context objects than a word translation task. The phonological activation of context objects were absent again in Experiments 2 and 3. Bayes Factor analysis suggested that the absence of phonological activation of context pictures was reliable. Results consistently revealed that only target lemma could activate the corresponding phonological node to guide articulation whereas no phonological activation of non-target lemma’s in Chinese. The present findings thus support a discrete model in Chinese spoken word production, which was contrastive with the cascaded view in alphabetic languages production.

Highlights

Speech production system is assumed to be as a network of interconnected nodes such as semantic, syntactic and phonological information (e.g., Dell, 1986; Roelofs, 1992; Caramazza, 1997; Levelt et al, 1999; Bloem and La Heij, 2003)
Context pictures facilitated the translation of the probe words in semantically related condition while had no impact on the probe word translation in phonologically related condition, even using a totally different group of bilinguals in this experiment
In line with previous studies on translation from the second language to the first language, the clear effect of semantic relatedness could be taken as evidence that the semantic representations of context pictures and probe words were activated (La Heij et al, 1996)

Summary

Introduction

Speech production system is assumed to be as a network of interconnected nodes such as semantic, syntactic and phonological information (e.g., Dell, 1986; Roelofs, 1992; Caramazza, 1997; Levelt et al, 1999; Bloem and La Heij, 2003). The Serial discrete models (e.g., Levelt et al, 1999) argue that for a given target word, only a single selected lemma spreads activation to the phonological level, and semantic processing must be completed before phonological processing commences. Non-serial models such as the cascaded models (e.g., Humphreys et al, 1988; Morsella and Miozzo, 2002) propose that multiple lexicalsemantic candidates are co-activated during retrieval of the target word transmit activation to the phonological level. One of the debates concerns on whether the phonological activation is restricted to the target lexical node. To specify, when naming an object, does it necessarily lead to the phonological activation of multiple lexical nodes other than that of the target object only?

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