Locus of orthographic facilitation effect in spoken word production: Evidence from cantonese Chinese

Previous research of picture naming in a picture-word interference paradigm has demonstrated independent facilitative effects of orthographic and phonological similarity in Chinese, as homophonous characters can be visually dissimilar. This study investigated the locus of orthographic priming in Chinese and assessed the hypothesis that the effect can be in part semantically based, through manipulating the extent of orthographic and semantic relatedness between target-distractor characters. Our findings replicated previous results of independent orthographic facilitation and semantic interference, as well as different time courses of these effects. More importantly, we observed longer naming latencies when the distractor was both semantically and orthographically related to the target compared with orthographically similar distractors, and an interaction between semantic and orthographic similarity. These findings suggest that orthographic facilitation on picture naming in Chinese is located at the semantic or the lemma level.