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Phonological encoding is free from orthographic influence: evidence from a picture variant of the phonological Stroop task

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Abstract

The phonological Stroop task, in which the participant names the color of written distractors, is being used increasingly to study the phonological encoding process in speech production. A brief review of experimental paradigms used to study the phonological encoding process indicated that currently it is not known whether the onset overlap benefit (faster color naming when the distractor shares the onset segment with the color name) in a phonological Stroop task is due to phonology or orthography. The present paper investigated this question using a picture variant of the phonological Stroop task. Participants named a small set of line drawings of animals (e.g., camel) with a pseudoword distractor printed on it. Picture naming was facilitated when the distractor shared the onset segment with the picture name regardless of orthographic overlap (CUST–camel = KUST–camel < NUST–camel). We conclude that the picture variant of the phonological Stroop task is a useful tool to study the phonological encoding process, free of orthographic influence.

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Notes

  1. Starreveld and La Heij’s (2017) paper was in direct opposition to Dell’Aqua, Job, Peressotti and Pascali (2007) who titled their paper “The picture–word interference effect is not a Stroop effect”. In brief, Starreveld and La Heij noted that the results observed by Dell’Aqua et al. and taken as evidence for the dissociation between the two tasks have not been replicated in two later studies, and that the difference is likely to have been due to the methodological differences between the two tasks as they are standardly used. In particular, in the classic Stroop task, but not in the PWI task, only few targets selected from a single semantic category (colors) are used, and the distractors are also drawn from this category. Readers are referred to Starreveld and La Heij (2017) for further detail.

  2. Note that the orthographic (graphemic) overlap is not the same as letter overlap. Specifically, the vowel segment in “seal” is pronounced /i:/ and orthographically represented by the grapheme “ea”, and not “e” (/ɛ/) as in SELP. We deemed SELP, SELM, and SELG (for seal) as acceptable for this reason.

  3. This pattern of finding (CUST = KUST < NUST when naming “camel”) has since been replicated (Kinoshita & Mills, 2020). That study further found no difference between the three distractor conditions (CUST = KUST = NUST) when the response was a manual key press response and did not involve a speech response, consistent with the claim that the effect of onset overlap benefit originates in the phonological encoding process.

  4. In contrast, picture targets used by Lupker (1982) were selected from a children’s coloring book, and the names of some of the pictures (e.g., “fire”) may have been more ambiguous, which may have contributed to the greater role of the name retrieval process.

  5. In this context, we remind the readers that others (e.g., Geng et al., 2014; Shitova et al., 2016) have also noted a substantial reduction in picture naming latency when a small set of pictures is used repeatedly.

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Funding

This study was funded by the Australian Research Council Discovery project scheme (Grant number DP140101199).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, Macquarie University Centre for Reading (MQCR), Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, 2109, Australia

    Sachiko Kinoshita

  2. Department of Oral and Maxillofacial Radiology, Institute of Biomedical and Health Sciences, Hiroshima University, 1-2-3 Kasumi, Minami-ku, Hiroshima, 734-8553, Japan

    Rinus G. Verdonschot

Authors
  1. Sachiko Kinoshita
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  2. Rinus G. Verdonschot
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Correspondence to Sachiko Kinoshita.

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The data and output of analyses reported in this paper are available at the Open Science Framework, at the following URL: https://osf.io/c7uyt/.

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Kinoshita, S., Verdonschot, R.G. Phonological encoding is free from orthographic influence: evidence from a picture variant of the phonological Stroop task. Psychological Research 85, 1340–1347 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00426-020-01315-2

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