It Is Not Necessary to Retrieve the Phonological Nodes of Context Objects for Chinese Speakers

The issue of how activation is transmitted from semantic to phonological level in spoken production remains controversial. Recent evidences from alphabetic languages support a cascaded view. However, given the different architecture of phonological encoding in non-alphabetic languages, it is not clear whether this view applies in Chinese, as a non-alphabetic script. We therefore investigated whether the not-to-be named pictures activate their phonological properties in Chinese speech production. In Experiment 1, participants were presented a target English word and a context picture (semantically related or unrelated, phonologically related or unrelated to target word in Chinese) and were asked to translate the English word into a Chinese word. The translation latencies were faster in the semantically related condition than in the unrelated condition. By contrast, no difference between phonologically related and unrelated was observed. In Experiment 2, in order to promote participants phonological sensitivity in a word-translation task, we increased the proportion of phonologically related trials from 25 to 50%. In Experiment 3, we employed a word association task that was more sensitive to phonological activation of context objects than a word translation task. The phonological activation of context objects were absent again in Experiments 2 and 3. Bayes Factor analysis suggested that the absence of phonological activation of context pictures was reliable. Results consistently revealed that only target lemma could activate the corresponding phonological node to guide articulation whereas no phonological activation of non-target lemma’s in Chinese. The present findings thus support a discrete model in Chinese spoken word production, which was contrastive with the cascaded view in alphabetic languages production.