Lh. Tan et Ca. Perfetti, Phonological codes as early sources of constraint in Chinese word identification: A review of current discoveries and theoretical accounts, READ WRIT, 10(3-5), 1998, pp. 165-200
A written Chinese character has a more direct connection with its meaning t
han a written word in English does. Moreover, because there is no unit in t
he writing system that encodes single phonemes, grapheme-phoneme mappings a
re impossible. These unique features have led some researchers to speculate
that phonological processing does not occur in visual identification of Ch
inese words or that meaning is activated earlier than phonology. This hypot
hesis, however, has been challenged by more recent discoveries that suggest
that phonology in Chinese, just as in English, is central to the visual re
cognition system. The present paper reviews the literature on phonological
codes as early sources of constraint in Chinese word identification and con
siders the specific aspects of phonological and orthographic processing in
Chinese that may differ from those in English. It emphasizes that early pho
nological processes and phonological mediation are two different questions
in the identification-with-phonology hypothesis. 'Mediation' and 'prelexica
l phonology', two very important concepts in the literature on phonological
computation in reading English, are both misleading in Chinese.