The Nature of Sublexical Processing in Reading Chinese Characters

The nature of sublexical processing in reading complex (or compound) Chinese characters was investigated in 3 primed naming experiments. In Experiments 1 and 2, facilitatory priming effects were observed for target characters, which were semantically related to the phonetic radicals embedded in complex characters but not to the complex characters themselves. In Experiment 3, the presence of semantic primes, which were related to the phonetic radicals embedded in the complex targets but not to the targets themselves, was found to increase the naming latencies to the targets. It is argued that sublexical processing in reading Chinese is both a phonological and a semantic event. There are no fundamental differences between sublexical processing of phonetic radicals and lexical processing of simple and complex characters.