Visual Chinese character recognition: Does phonological information mediate access to meaning?

Abstract

Recent evidence demonstrates early phonological processes during the identification of Chinese words. Evidence on whether such processes "mediate" access to Chinese word meaning is less clear. The present studies investigated mediation, using a paradigm which has demonstrated "phonologically mediated priming" with English words that naming time of a target word (e.g., sand) is facilitated more by a homophone of a semantic associate (e.g., beech) than by a control (e.g., bench) (Lesch & Pollatsek, 1993). Prime-target stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA) varied at 129, 243, and 500 ms. In the 129-and 243-ms SOA conditions, critical results involved the role of homophone density in naming Chinese words: (1) Homophones of synonyms facilitated target identification for primes with few homophones, but not for primes with many homophones. (2) Synonym primes facilitated naming in all conditions, but the effect was reduced when primes had many homophones. (3) Synonym priming was greater than homophone priming across SOAs of 129 and 243 ms. At the 500-ms SOA, however, only synonyms facilitated target recognition. These results suggest that phonological information is best thought of as a spreading activation that is shared among written units, with mediation, in the classic sense, restricted to cases in which this activation is distributed among relatively few units. Implications for a model of Chinese reading and the general concept of mediation are discussed. © 1997 Academic Press.