Lexical activation during the recognition of Chinese characters: Evidence against early phonological activation

Abstract

In two primed-naming experiments involving Chinese character recognition, one with native Mandarinspeaking subjects and another with native Cantonese-speaking subjects, we varied both the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) and the prime-target similarity along various lexical dimensions. Across both experiments, the results were as follows: (1) Relatively strong and reliable semantic priming appeared very early across various SOAs, and its onset was not affected by meaning precision, (2) either homophonic priming had negligible effects on target naming or the effects appeared relatively late (only at 57 msec), and (3) graphic inhibition was found across different SOAs. Since the same set of stimuli and procedure were adopted as those in the study of Perfetti and Tan (1998), the present findings raise questions about the reliability and validity of the results from their study that have been used to support the notion that phonology is a constitutive element of character recognition and precedes meaning access in the identification process. Instead, the present results suggest that phonology is optional for accessing meaning in Chinese character recognition among skilled adult readers.

Homophonic and semantic priming of Japanese kanji words: A time course study

“…Furthermore, even in studies of naming, evidence for phonological priming is not consistently obtained in logographic readers. For example, Perfetti and Tan's finding was not replicated by other researchers (Chen & Shu, 2001;Wu & Chen, 2000;Wu & Chou, 2000). Thus, it would appear that the evidence from Chinese readers to date does not provide a clear test of the universal phonology principle.…”

Differences between Chinese morphosyllabic and German alphabetic readers in the Stroop interference effect

“…Since some studies (e.g., Chen & Shu, 2001;Zhou & Marslen-Wilson, 1999) have called into question findings on phonological processing in accessing the meaning of Chinese characters, we sought to replicate the findings from Spinks et al (2000) which show that Stroop interference in Chinese readers is also caused by orthographically dissimilar homophones of incongruent color words. In Chinese, fence is pronounced exactly like blue.…”

The Lexical Constituency Model: Some Implications of Research on Chinese for General Theories of Reading.

“…The facilitative component of this orthographic effect may be fragile. H.-C. Chen and Shu (2001) report a study identical in critical respects to Perfetti and Tan (1998) in which they fail to find facilitative priming by a graphically similar prime at 43 ms and 57 ms. However, other results are consistent with the pattern of Perfetti and Tan.…”