Orthographic facilitation effects on spoken word production: Evidence from Chinese

The aim of this experiment was to investigate the time course of orthographic facilitation on picture naming in Chinese. We used a picture-word paradigm to investigate orthographic and phonological facilitation on monosyllabic spoken word production in native Mandarin speakers. Both the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) and the picture-word relationship were varied along different lexical dimensions including measures of orthographic similarity between the distractor and the target and measures of phonological similarity between the distractor and target. Results showed independent effects of orthographic and phonological facilitation that varied across SOA. Specifically, orthographic facilitation was observed prior to phonological facilitation. We argue that theoretical models of spoken word production need to explain the independent effects of orthography on picture naming in Chinese as well as the variable time course. The implication of orthographic facilitation effects on speech production in other languages is also discussed.