Intralanguage vs. interlanguage Stroop effects in two types of writing systems

The relation between word processing strategy and the orthographic structure of a written language was explored in the present study. Three experiments were conducted using Chinese-English, Spanish-English, and Japanese-English bilinguals, respectively. Each subject was asked to perform a modified Stroop color-naming task in which the stimulus and the response language were either the same or different. The magnitude of the Stroop effect was greater in the intralanguage condition than in the interlanguage condition. When the magnitude of reduction of Stroop interference from the intra- to the interlanguage condition was compared across all bilingual groups, an inverse relationship was found between the magnitude of reduction and the degree of similarity between the orthographic structures of the two written languages. It is concluded that reading logographic and reading phonetic symbols entail different processing mechanisms and that controversial issues in bilingual processing cannot be resolved without taking into account the effect of orthographic variations on the information processing system.