Skip to main content
Log in

Phonological inhibition in written production

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Psychological Research Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The present study investigated the contribution of phonological relatedness on written production using the blocked cyclic naming paradigm. Participants were instructed to write down picture names in homogeneous and heterogeneous context. In the homogeneous context, items shared a syllable which corresponded to different written forms in various items. The position type of the shared syllable was manipulated so that the shared syllable was initial-only or distributed across various positions of words. Contrary to previous studies which showed facilitative effects of phonological relatedness on written production, interference effects in both reaction times and errors were found for both position types of phonological overlap. The findings indicate that phonological overlap does not always lead to facilitation but inhibition could occur. Implications of the present findings for theoretical models of word production are discussed.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1

Similar content being viewed by others

Availability of data and materials

The datasets during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Notes

  1. Visual complexity and concept familiarity were obtained from 16 participants who rated pictures on a 7-point scale. Word frequency was obtained from the Chinese Linguistic Data Consortium (2003). Number of strokes was calculated by the author.

  2. Response time ~ (position type + context + cycle) ^3 + (1 + context + cycle|subject) + (1 + context + cycle|item).

References

Download references

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Markus Damian for his thoughtful discussion and comments on an earlier version of the paper. This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, No. 31771212, Youth Innovation Promotion Association CAS, and the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the NSFC in project Crossmodal Learning, DFG TRR-169/NSFC No. 61621136008 to Qu, and Youth Talent Project (China Association for Science and Technology).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Qingqing Qu.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Ethics approval

This study followed the ethical procedures for the protection of human participants in research and was approved by the ethics committee of the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Informed consent was obtained from each participant prior to the experiment.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Appendix

Appendix

See appendix Tables 2, 3

Table 2 Materials used for the word-initial overlap position type
Table 3 Materials used for the distributed overlap position type

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Feng, C., Qu, Q. Phonological inhibition in written production. Psychological Research 85, 2271–2278 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01414-0

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01414-0

Navigation