A backward-masking procedure was used to examine phonological processing in Chinese character identification. In Experiment 1, the character target and mask were presented for 50 ms and 30 ms, respectively. The results indicated graphic but not phonological nor semantic masks affected target recognition. In Experiment 2, the exposure durations of the target and mask were extended to 60 ms and 40 ms, respectively. We observed a significant phonological mask facilitation effect for high-frequency targets and the absence of semantic mask effect. A postexperiment analysis showed that when the high-frequency targets had well-defined meaning, the semantic masks facilitated target identification, whereas when the high-frequency targets had fuzzy meaning, no significant semantic mask effect was obtained. Results indicate that getting at the phonology of highfrequency characters with fuzzy meaning occurs presemantically.

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Two experiments examined whether the speed of activating different aspects of a word's meaning influences the time course of accessing phonology and meaning. The authors used a backward masking paradigm with Chinese materials. When targets were exposed at threshold + 14 ms, homophonic masks were observed to facilitate target identification. Semantic masks in the absence of associative relatedness to targets did not affect recognition, irrespective of target semantic vagueness. Associate masks facilitated the recognition of semantically precise but not vague targets. These findings suggest that phonological activation precedes semantic activation and the activation of associative relatedness of vague-semantic characters. The authors argue that phonological codes are accessed through a character-as-a-whole-to-sound-as-a-whole association.An important debate in the field of visual word recognition is whether the phonology of a word is retrieved before or after access to its meaning representation (

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