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The Chinese phonograms consist of a semantic radical and a phonetic radical. The two types of radicals have different functional contributions to their host phonogram. The semantic radical typically signifies the meaning of the phonogram, while the phonetic radical usually contains a phonological clue to the phonogram’s pronunciation. However, it is still unclear how they interplay with each other when we attempt to recognize a phonogram because previous studies rarely manipulated the functionality of the two types of radicals in a single design. Using a full factorial design, the present study aimed to probe this issue by directly manipulating the functional validity of the two types of radicals in a lexical decision task with both behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) measurements. The results showed that recognition of phonograms which were related to their semantic radicals in meaning took a shorter reaction time, showed a lower error rate, and elicited a smaller P200 and a larger N400 than did recognition of those which had no semantic relation with their semantic radicals. However, the validity of phonetic radicals did not show any main effect or interaction with that of semantic radicals on either behavioral or ERP measurements. These results indicated that semantic radicals played a dominant role in the recognition of phonograms. Transparent semantic radicals, which provide valid semantic cues to phonograms, can facilitate the recognition of phonograms.

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The present study separated radical level phonology from character level phonology to explore the reliance on phonology during Chinese sentence reading with eye movement recording in a boundary paradigm. Participants viewed sentences with either regular, irregular, orthographically dissimilar homophone, or orthographically dissimilar non-homophone previews for the targets. Both regular and irregular characters contained the target character as the phonetic radical, with the regular character sharing the identical sound with its target phonetic radical. In Experiment 1, the irregular previews were different from the target phonetic radicals both in the first consonant and final compound vowels. In Experiment 2, the irregular characters would be replaced by the semi-regular previews, which shared the same final compound vowels but not the first consonant with the target characters. The radical level phonological preview benefit was obtained by the comparison between regular and irregular characters, while the character level phonological preview benefit was shown by the visually dissimilar homophones compared with the unrelated control condition. The preview benefit from parafoveal regular characters compared with irregular characters was observed in the first fixation duration, suggesting the early activation of phonological codes at radical levels. However, this preview benefit depends on phonological overlapping between the phonetic radicals and their host characters; it could be activated only when the pronunciation of the phonogram was totally consistent with that of its phonetic radical. Furthermore, the null preview effect of visually dissimilar homophones indicates no activation of phonological codes at the character level during Chinese sentence reading.