Phonological Stroop effects in Chinese and English: A comparison of children with dyslexia, typically developing children, and adults

Relative to good readers, poor readers tend to show stronger Stroop effects. Using homophones of color words as stimuli, Guo, Peng, and Liu [Cognition, 98(2), B21-B34 (2005)] found that children with lower reading ability demonstrated stronger phonological Stroop effects than those with higher reading ability. However, it is unclear whether the stronger effects reflected weaker inhibitory control, or stronger phonological activation upon seeing Chinese words, or both. In the current study, 23 second or third graders (12 with Chinese dyslexia and 11 typically developing) and 21 typically reading university students from Hong Kong completed both Chinese and English Stroop tasks, i.e., naming the ink color of Chinese and English words. The Chinese Stroop task included four conditions: 1) incongruent color words and 2) their controls, 3) homophones of incongruent color words and 4) their controls. The English Stroop task included these four conditions and two other conditions: 5) orthographic neighbors of incongruent color words and 6) their controls. Overall, the three groups showed significantly different Stroop effects in terms of accuracy rate, but not naming latency, in the Chinese Stroop task. Specifically, the dyslexic children showed a stronger phonological Stroop effect than the non-dyslexic children and adults. However, no significant group difference was found in the English Stroop effects. Since inhibitory control is a general cognitive ability, the group difference in the phonological Stroop effect of Chinese but not English suggests that Chinese dyslexic children activate phonological codes more strongly than those without dyslexia when seeing Chinese words repeatedly. Copyright © 2020 ARWA.