Development of a verbal inhibitory control task for Cantonese speakers

Abstract

Previous research has indicated normal English speaking controls were subject to proactive interference (PI) with manipulated semantic and phonological relatedness of distance between probes and list-items (Hamilton & Martin, 2007). We aimed at replicating results to Cantonese participants using negative probe test and to investigate if variation in writing and phonological system would inflict differential inhibitory processing. Relative to the English precedent, healthy participants showed concurrent ability to inhibit irrelevant information when probes are related to previous list. PI was significant on same list trials with semantically-related conditions, but not when they are phonologically-related. Such differential results provided important implications for language specificity where phonological processing units are shorter in Cantonese with mix of consonant-vowel-tone combinations than at individual phonemic level in English (Wong & Chen, 2009). Word frequency, regularity and use of visual strategies may also enhance recognition latency based on familiarity and level of activation during lexical processing.