Pseudohomophone effects in processing Chinesecompound words

摘要

The issue of how phonological information becomes available in readingChinese and the role that it plays in lexical access was investigated for Chinesecompound words, using pseudohomoone effects in lexical and phonologicaldecision as a diagnostic tool. Pseudohomophones were created by replacingone or both constituents of two-character compound words with orthographi-cally dissimilar homophonic characters. Experiment 1 found that mixedpseudohomophones sharing one constituent with their base words were moredifficult to reject than control nonwords in lexical decision. Pure pseudoho-mophones sharing no constituents with their base words did not show thiseffect. Experiment 2 used mixed pseudohomophones and found an interactionbetween base word frequency and the frequency of constituent characters indetermining pseudohomophone effects. Experiment 3 used a phonologicaldecision task and found exceptionally poor performance for pure pseudoho-mophones. These results are interpreted in an interactive framework where thedirect mapping from orthography to semantics is dominant and phonologyplays a subsidiary role.