Horizontal Flow of Semantic and Phonological Information in Chinese Spoken Sentence Production

A variant of the picture—word interference paradigm was used in three experiments to investigate the horizontal information flow of semantic and phonological information between nouns in spoken Mandarin Chinese sentences. Experiment 1 demonstrated that there is a semantic interference effect when the word in the second phrase (N3) and the first noun in the initial phrase (N1) are semantically related, while there is no effect when N3 and the second noun in the initial phrase (N2) are semantically related. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that there is a phonological facilitation effect only when the two phonologically related words are both in the initial phrase, and there is no effect when they are in different phrases. Reinforcing the findings of an earlier study of horizontal information flow by Smith and Wheeldon (2004), our results indicate that there is a temporal overlap in the access of the nouns in spoken Mandarin Chinese sentences and a flow of semantic and phonological information between these nouns. Moreover, our results are incompatible with a wholly parallel view of horizontal information flow and instead provide support for a view which is partly serial and partly parallel in nature.