Phonological activation of category coordinates in spoken word production: Evidence for cascaded processing in English but not in Mandarin

Abstract

A central issue in spoken word production concerns how activation is transmitted from semantic to phonological levels. Recent evidence from studies of speakers of Western languages supports a cascaded view, according to which under certain circumstances, lexical candidates other than the target can activate their corresponding phonological properties. In the current study, we investigated possible differences between English and Mandarin speakers concerning the degree of cascadedness in the production system, based on the broader recent claim that properties of word form encoding might differ according to languages. With English speakers (Experiment 1), we found that when activation of targets and semantic competitors was boosted via a manipulation of semantic context, then concurrently presented “mediated” distractor words (which were phonologically related to a semantic competitor) generated interference. However, no such mediated priming was found in a parallel experiment with Chinese materials and Mandarin speakers (Experiment 2). These results suggest potential fundamental differences across the target languages in how activation is transmitted during lexical access.

Aging Effects on Phonological and Semantic Priming in the Tip-of-the-Tongue: Evidence From a Two-Step Approach

“…Studies have reported that semantically related primes decreased TOT resolution rates and even blocked retrieval in older speakers (Abrams and Rodriguez, 2005;Abrams et al, 2007;White et al, 2013). Semantically related primes interfere with targets retrieval if they compete for lexical selection, as evidenced by semantic interference effect (Damian et al, 2001;Zhang et al, 2018). Older adults showed greater semantic interference and priming effects in comparison with young adults (Laver and Burke, 1993;Taylor and Burke, 2002;Rizio et al, 2017).…”

“…Recent findings in Mandarin Chinese revealed that the relation between semantic and phonological processes is serial and discrete in spoken word production for young native speakers (Zhu et al, 2015(Zhu et al, , 2016Zhang et al, 2018). That is, there is a unidirectional transmission from semantic nodes to phonological nodes in Chinese spoken word production.…”

“…Studies demonstrated that the relation between semantics and phonology is discrete in Chinese but interactive in alphabetic languages such as English (Starreveld and La Heij, 1995;Damian and Martin, 1999;Zhu et al, 2015Zhu et al, , 2016Zhang et al, 2018), which might lead to different patterns of aging effect across language systems. In the present study, however, we observed a significant interaction between factors of semantic and phonological relatedness when target names were not retrieved successfully, reflecting an interactive pattern of semantics and phonology in reducing TOTs occurrence.…”

Multiple phonological activation in writing: evidence for cascadedness in Chinese written verb production

“…Correspondingly, previous studies have confirmed that increased semantic activation aids in the detection of multiple phonological activation. For instance, multiple phonological activation was observed only when semantic activation was amplified through a semantic blocking manipulation, alongside the presentation of mediated distractor words that were phonologically related to a semantic competitor ( Zhang et al, 2018 ), or scenarios involving synonyms ( Peterson and Savoy, 1998 ).…”