Picture-word interference effects on naming in Chinese

The presence of a semantic relationship between the name of a target picture and a distractor word (e.g., CAT-dog) hampers picture naming in a picture-word interference task, whereas a graphemic-phonological relationship between a distractor word and the name of a target picture (e.g., CAT-cap) facilitates word naming. One issue to emerge from this research is the relative contribution of graphemic and phonological information to the facilitation effect. In alphabetic languages, orthography and phonology are unavoidably confounded, making it difficult to establish the loci of graphemic and phonological facilitation effects. However, in non-alphabetic languages such as Chinese it is possible to examine independently the relative contribution of graphemic and phonological information to the facilitation effect. We report two experiments investigating semantic interference effects and graphemic-phonological facilitation effects on picture naming in Chinese. Results show three independent effects on picture naming latency: a semantic interference effect that is due to shared category membership between the target picture and a distractor word; a graphemic facilitation effect that is due to shared orthography between target and distractor words; and a phonological facilitation. effect that is due to homophony between target and distractor names. We argue that semantic interference and graphemic facilitation effects can be accounted for by activation at the lemma level whereas phonological facilitation results from activation at the name retrieval stage.