Differences between Chinese morphosyllabic and German alphabetic readers in the Stroop interference effect

From orthography to meaning: an electrophysiological investigation of the role of phonology in accessing meaning of Chinese single-character words

“…However, this semantic-based explanation for the homophone Stroop interference effect should be interpreted cautiously. Within the framework of the dual-route model it has been suggested that at least two processes were involved when participants perform Stroop tasks, namely a semantic and a phonological process (Coltheart et al, 1999;Saalbach and Stern, 2004). Words with strong semantic association to colors, such as GRASS, may produce a Stroop interference effect relative to neutral words such as HEART (Klein, 1964;Saalbach and Stern, 2004); this effect is taken to be semantic in nature and can be attributed to a conflict in the semantic lexicon.…”

“…While a number of studies do provide support for this direct access hypothesis (Chen and Shu, 2001;Meng et al, 2008), many behavioral experiments indicate that phonology plays an important role in accessing meaning of Chinese words (Chen and Tsoi, 1990;Guo et al, 2005;Perfetti and Zhang, 1995;Saalbach and Stern, 2004;Spinks et al, 2000;Tan and Perfetti, 1997;Xu et al, 1999), such as in Stroop tasks (Chen and Tsoi, 1990;Guo et al, 2005;Saalbach and Stern, 2004;Spinks et al, 2000).…”

“…Homophones of color words (e.g., ,/hong2/,mean flood, homophone of "red" in Chinese, the numeral here refers to Chinese tone) are often used to investigate the role of phonology in semantic access. For example, some studies found that semantically incongruent homophones of color words (e.g., in green) elicited significantly longer reaction times and/or higher error rates than congruent homophones (e.g., in red) (Chen and Tsoi, 1990;Guo et al, 2005;Saalbach and Stern, 2004;Spinks et al, 2000). Since the meaning of homophones is semantically unrelated to colors, this effect is typically interpreted as such that homophones activated the meaning of color words via the shared phonological code (Chen and Tsoi, 1990;Guo et al, 2005;Saalbach and Stern, 2004;Spinks et al, 2000).…”

Neuroscience in Intercultural Contexts

“…Many characters can share the same pronunciation, creating a high number of homophones. Because phonology is less reliable in Chinese, some researchers have theorized that Chinese character recognition proceeds using a "direct-access" route directly from orthography to semantics, bypassing phonology altogether (Saalbach & Stern, 2004 ;Taft & van Graan, 1998 ). In contrast, other evidence suggest that phonology is activated in Chinese word recognition, even in the absence of lexical activation (Chua, 1999 ;Guo, Peng, & Liu, 2005 ;Liu, Perfetti, & Hart, 2003 ;Perfetti et al, 2005 ;Saalbach & Stern, 2004 ;Spinks, Liu, Perfetti, & Tan, 2000 ;Tan, Laird, Li, & Fox, 2005 ;Xu, Pollatsek, & Potter, 1999 ).…”

“…As discussed in Section 4.1 , script-specifi c lexical factors can affect processes of phonological access (e.g., Perfetti et al, 2005 ;Saalbach & Stern, 2004 ), orthographic recognition (e.g., Bar-Kochva, 2011 ;, language production speed (Bates et al, 2003 ), and the neural representations of languages in the brain (e.g., Bick et al, 2011 ;Bolger et al, 2005 ;Tan et al, 2005 ). It is therefore also possible that the magnitude of the L1 and/or L2 delay in lexical processing is modulated by language-specifi c differences.…”