Sublexical processing in reading Chinese: A development study

Three primed naming experiments were conducted to investigate the development of sublexical processing in reading Chinese. Target characters were either homophonic to (Experiments 1 and 2) or semantically related to (Experiment 3) phonetic radicals embedded in irregular complex characters, but not to the complex character themselves. For both the third and sixth grade school children, targets were named faster when they were preceded by such complex characters than by unrelated primes, although the semantic effect of complex characters was not significant for the third grade children. It is argued that, from early on in learning to read Chinese, phonetic radicals embedded in complex characters are decomposed from visual input and used to activate their own phonological and semantic properties, in parallel to the processing of whole characters.