Acta Psychologica Sinica

Abstract

Three sets of experiments were conducted to investigate the relationship between semantic activation (lexical selection) and phonological encoding in the speech production of Chinese. The issue of whether semantic activation and phonological encoding is interactive or discrete can be divided further into whether there is multiple phonological activation and whether there is feedback from phonological activation to lemma and semantic representation. Experiments 1 and 2 employed a picture-word interference paradigm in which a Chinese character was superimposed on a picture. In Experiment 1, picture naming was delayed both by a character semantically related to the picture name and by a homophonic character of the semantic competitor. In Experiment 2, naming of the semantically related character and its homophone was both facilitated by the picture. These results were consistent with the interactive view that phonological encoding does not wait until lemma selection is finished and phonological information of both the target word and its close semantic competitors is activated in speech production. Experiment 3 used a semantic categorization task in which the difficulty of categorization was varied across three sub-experiments. Subjects were asked to make speeded semantic judgment to pictures onto which characters semantically related to the pictures or characters homophonic to the picture names were superimposed. Facilitatory effects were observed for the semantic condition but no effect was observed for the homophone condition. Thus phonological activation had no feedback influence on the semantic activation of the picture, consistent with the modular view. These findings suggest that the issue of multiple phonological activations and the issue of phonological feedback to lemma and semantics should be differentiated in theories of speech production. While the modular view could accept the suggestion of multiple phonological activation, the interactive view has more difficulties in accommodating the present findings.

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