The effect of orthographic form-cuing on the phonological preparation unit in spoken word production

Two experiments using the form-preparation paradigm were conducted to investigate the effect of orthographic form-cuing on the phonological preparation unit during spoken word production with native Mandarin speakers. In both experiments, participants were instructed to memorize nine prompt-response monosyllabic word pairs, after which an associative naming session was conducted in which the prompts were presented and participants were asked to say the corresponding response names as quickly and accurately as possible. In both experiments, the response words in the homogeneous lists shared the same onsets, or shared the same rimes; the response names had no common aspects of pronunciation in the heterogeneous lists. Chinese characters (Experiment 1) and Pinyin (phonetic transcription of the characters) (Experiment 2) were used to investigate the effect of the orthographic form. Significant onset facilitation and rime inhibition was shown for Pinyin syllables but not for characters. The contrasts of the onset and rime effect in the two orthographic forms suggest that a specific phonological unit is promoted in spoken word production in a certain orthographic form. Pinyin cued the participants to prepare the onset whereas Chinese characters did not. The rime interference effect may arise as a result of lexical competition in spoken word production.