Phonological codes constrain output of orthographic codes via sublexical and lexical routes in Chinese written production.

Cheng Wang,Qingfang Zhang,Peter Howell

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0124470

Cheng Wang, Qingfang Zhang + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0124470

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Abstract

To what extent do phonological codes constrain orthographic output in handwritten production? We investigated how phonological codes constrain the selection of orthographic codes via sublexical and lexical routes in Chinese written production. Participants wrote down picture names in a picture-naming task in Experiment 1or response words in a symbol—word associative writing task in Experiment 2. A sublexical phonological property of picture names (phonetic regularity: regular vs. irregular) in Experiment 1and a lexical phonological property of response words (homophone density: dense vs. sparse) in Experiment 2, as well as word frequency of the targets in both experiments, were manipulated. A facilitatory effect of word frequency was found in both experiments, in which words with high frequency were produced faster than those with low frequency. More importantly, we observed an inhibitory phonetic regularity effect, in which low-frequency picture names with regular first characters were slower to write than those with irregular ones, and an inhibitory homophone density effect, in which characters with dense homophone density were produced more slowly than those with sparse homophone density. Results suggested that phonological codes constrained handwritten production via lexical and sublexical routes.

Highlights

Over the past a few decades, many studies have been conducted to investigate the processes and mechanisms underlying spoken production [1,2,3]
The homophone density (HD) and consistency were used as covariates in the analysis, which was enriched by subsequently adding phonetic regularity, word frequency (WF), and the interaction between WF and phonetic regularity
According to Sternberg's additive factors logic [54], the absence of the interaction between WF and HD indicated that WF and HD may influence different processing stage of written production, and the HD effect was independent of the WF effect

Summary

Introduction

Over the past a few decades, many studies have been conducted to investigate the processes and mechanisms underlying spoken production [1,2,3]. Investigations devoted to an understanding of written production are limited. We investigated how phonological codes constrained the selection of orthographic codes by sublexical and lexical routes in Chinese written production. Theoretical accounts claimed that retrieval of an orthographic representation is entirely dependent on prior retrieval of phonological codes, which is called obligatory phonological mediation hypothesis. Evidence supporting this view is derived from the common introspective experience of written production

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