The time course of speech production revisited: no early orthographic effect, even in Mandarin Chinese

Most psycholinguistic models of speech production agree on an earlier semantic processing stage and a later word-form encoding stage. Using a logographic language, Mandarin Chinese, Zhang and Weekes [2009. Orthographic facilitation effects on spoken word production: Evidence from Chinese. Language and Cognitive Processes, 24(7–8), 1082–1096. https://doi.org/10.1080/01690960802042133] reported an early effect of orthography in a picture-word-interference study and suggested orthography affects speech production via a lexical-semantic pathway at an early stage. This early orthographic effect without co-occurrence of phonological effect, however, was not replicated [Zhao, La Heij, & Schiller, 2012. Orthographic and phonological facilitation in speech production: New evidence from picture naming in Chinese. Acta Psychologica, 139(2), 272–280. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actpsy.2011.12.001]. The present study aimed to dissociate further the semantic and phonological representations from orthography by using simplex Chinese characters. The results of Experiment 1 and 2 revealed an orthographic effect but only at a similar point in time as the phonological effect, both of which followed the semantic effect. Our results thus raise further doubts about the role of orthography at the conceptual level of speech planning and lend new evidence to a two-step model of speech production.