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.
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
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.
Response time ~ (position type + context + cycle) ^3 + (1 + context + cycle|subject) + (1 + context + cycle|item).
References
Afonso, O., & Álvarez, C. J. (2011). Phonological effects in hand- writing production: Evidence from the implicit priming paradigm. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 37, 1474–1483. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024515.
Baayen, R. H., Davidson, D. J., & Bates, D. M. (2008). Mixed-effects modeling with crossed random effects for subjects and items. Journal of Memory and Language, 59(4), 390–412. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2007.12.005.
Bates, D. M., Machler, M., Bolker, B., & Walker, S. (2015). Fitting linear mixed-effects models using lme4. Journal of Statistical Software, 67(1), 1–48. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v067.i01.
Bonin, P., Fayol, M., & Peereman, R. (1998). Masked form priming in writing words from pictures: Evidence for direct retrieval of orthographic codes. Acta Psychologica, 99, 311–328. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0001-6918(98)00017-1.
Bonin, P., Méot, A., Lagarrigue, A., & Roux, S. (2015). Written object naming, spelling to dictation, and immediate copying: Different tasks, different pathways? The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 68, 1268–1294. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2014.978877.
Bonin, P., Peereman, R., & Fayol, M. (2001). Do phonological codes constrain the selection of orthographic codes in written picture naming? Journal of Memory and Language, 45, 688–720. https://doi.org/10.1006/jmla.2000.2786.
Breining, B., Nozari, N., & Rapp, B. C. (2016). Does segmental overlap help or hurt? Evidence from blocked cyclic naming in spoken and written production. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23(2), 500–506. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-015-0900-x.
Chen, J., Chen, T. M., & Dell, G. S. (2002). Word-form encoding in mandarin Chinese as assessed by the implicit priming task. Journal of Memory and Language, 46(4), 751–781.
Chen, Q., & Mirman, D. (2012). Competition and cooperation among similar representations: Toward a unified account of facilitative and inhibitory effects of lexical neighbors. Psychological Review, 119(2), 417–430. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0027175.
Damian, M. F. (2019). A Role of Phonology in Orthographic Production? A Historical Perspective and Some Recent New Evidence. In Cyril Perret &Thierry Olive (Eds.), Spelling and Writing Words (pp. 19–40). Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004394988_003
Damian, M. F., Dorjee, D., & Stadthagen-Gonzalez, H. (2011). Long-term repetition priming in spoken and written word production: Evidence for a contribution of phonology to handwriting. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 37, 813–826. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0023260.
Damian, M. F., & Qu, Q. Q. (2013). Is handwriting constrained by phonology? Evidence from Stroop tasks with written responses and Chinese characters. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, Article no. 765. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00765
Forster, K. I., & Forster, J. C. (2003). DMDX: A windows display program with millisecond accuracy. Behavior Research Methods Instruments & Computers, 35(1), 116–124. https://doi.org/10.3758/bf03195503.
McClelland, J. L., & Rumelhart, D. E. (1981). An interactive activation model of context effects in letter perception: I. An account of basic findings. Psychological Review, 88(5), 375. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.88.5.375.
Meyer, A. S. (1990). The time course of phonological encoding in language production: The encoding of successive syllables of a word. Journal of Memory and Language, 29, 524–545. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-596X(90)90050-A.
Meyer, A. S. (1991). The time course of phonological encoding in language production: Phonological encoding inside a syllable. Journal of Memory and Language, 30, 69–69. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-596X(91)90011-8.
Oppenheim, G. M., Dell, G. S., & Schwartz, M. F. (2010). The dark side of incremental learning: A model of cumulative semantic interference during lexical access in speech production. Cognition, 114(2), 227–252. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2009.09.007.
O'Séaghdha, P. G., & Frazer, A. K. (2014). The exception does not rule: Attention constrains form preparation in word production. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(3), 797. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035576.
Qu, Q., Damian, M. F., & Li, X. (2015). Phonology contributes to writing: Evidence from a masked priming task. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 31(2), 251–264. https://doi.org/10.1080/23273798.2015.1091086.
Qu, Q. Q., Damian, M. F., Zhang, Q., & Zhu, X. B. (2011). Phonology contributes to writing: Evidence from written word production in a nonalphabetic script. Psychological Science, 22, 1107–1112. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611417001.
Rapp, B., & Damian, M. F. (2018). From thought to action. In Shirley-Ann Rueschemeyer & M. Gareth Gaskell (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Psycholinguistics (2nd ed., p. 398). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198786825.013.17
Roelofs, A. (1997). The WEAVER model of word-form encoding in speech production. Cognition, 64(3), 249–284. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(97)00027-9.
Shen, X. R., Damian, M. F., & Stadthagen-Gonzalez, H. (2013). Abstract graphemic representations support preparation of handwritten responses. Journal of Memory and Language, 68, 69–84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2012.10.003.
Zhang, Q., & Damian, M. (2010). Impact of phonology on the generation of handwritten responses: Evidence from picture-word interference tasks. Memory & Cognition, 38, 519–528. https://doi.org/10.3758/MC.38.8.1162.
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
Corresponding author
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.
Rights and permissions
About this article
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
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01414-0