Phonological activation in visual identification of Chinese two-character words

Evidence for phonological activation in the recognition of 2-character Chin ese words was discovered in 2 experiments. In a meaning-judgment task, Expe riment 1 exposed two words with stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) of 0, 71 , and 157 ms. At all 3 SOAs, times to make a "no" meaning judgment were lon ger for words that were homophones than for unrelated controls. In a lexica l-decision task, Experiment 2 manipulated the phonological consistency of 1 of the 2 characters. Responses to words with a phonologically inconsistent character were slower, regardless of the left-right position of the charac ter. These results add to previous results for 1-character words, suggestin g that phonology is an obligatory constituent of word identification in Chi nese. A proposed theoretical framework for 2-character word identification accounts for the results.