Lexical Organisation in Chinese Spoken Word Production: Evidence from Studies of Homophones

The research reported in this thesis was designed to shed light on the nature of the functional lexical organisation in Mandarin Chinese spoken word production. Two main theoretical issues were investigated: The lexical representations of homophones in Chinese, and how activation is transmitted from lexical to phonological levels in Chinese spoken word production. The results of two experimental studies of word reading responses to homophones and non-homophonic words (matched for word frequency, and a range of other variables) found no effect of frequency inheritance, contrary to the hypothesis that homophones have a shared phonological representation. The results of six experimental studies that examined the priming of object naming times by the prior presentation of prime words of various relationships showed that there are clear direct effects of repetition, homophone, and phonological (atonal syllable) priming. However, the experiments found no homophone-to-semantic, phonological-to-semantic, or semantic-to-homophone mediated priming effects. These results offer no support for interactive processing models of Chinese word production. However, two experimental studies found that Chinese-English bilinguals show homophone priming of object naming that is mediated by the Chinese translation-equivalents of English prime words. The results of the research reported in this thesis support two general conclusions concerning the Chinese speech production system: homophones have independent lexical phonological representations, and the processing underlying spoken word production operates in a mainly serial and discrete manner.