Phonological Activation in Visual Identification of Chinese Two-Character Words

Abstract

Evidence for phonological activation in the recognition of 2-character Chinese words was discovered in 2 experiments. In a meaning-judgment task, Experiment 1 exposed two words with stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 0, 71, and 157 ms. At all 3 SOAs, times to make a "no" meaning judgment were longer for words that were homophones than for unrelated controls. In a lexical-decision task, Experiment 2 manipulated the phonological consistency of 1 of the 2 characters. Responses to words with a phonologically inconsistent character were slower, regardless of the left-right position of the character. These results add to previous results for 1-character words, suggesting that phonology is an obligatory constituent of word identification in Chinese. A proposed theoretical framework for 2-character word identification accounts for the results.