The tongue-twister effect in reading Chinese.

Two studies demonstrate a visual tongue-twister effect (TTE) in Chinese and add support to the assumption that reading in any writing system engages a phonological memory system. Experiment 1 showed that (or both oral and silent reading, subjects took longer to read texts with repeated initial phonemes (IPs) than to read control stories with mixed IPs. Experiment 2 verified the phonemic nature of the TTE in a dual task situation in which subjects had to retain a string of digits while reading a sentence. The results showed a specific-phoneme interference such that subjects took longer to read the texts when digits and words had the same IPs than when they had different phonemes