Semantic context effects when naming Japanese kanji,but not Chinese hanzi

摘要

The process of reading aloud bare nouns in alphabetic languages is immune to semanticcontext effects from pictures. This is accounted for by assuming that words in alphabeticlanguages can be read aloud relatively fast through a sub-lexical grapheme-phoneme con-version (GPC) route or by a direct route from orthography to word form. We examinedsemantic context effects in a word-naming task in two languages with logographic scriptsfor which GPC cannot be applied: Japanese kanji and Chinese hanzi. We showed that read-ing aloud bare nouns is sensitive to semantically related context pictures in Japanese, butnot in Chinese. The difference between these two languages is attributed to processingcosts caused by multiple pronunciations for Japanese kanji.