ORTHOGRAPHY AND PHONOLOGY IN READING JAPANESE KANJI WORDS - EVIDENCE FROM THE SEMANTIC DECISION TASK WITH HOMOPHONES

Correspondences between spelling and sound for Japanese kanji are comp lex and deep. The meaning of kanji words has generally been assumed to be accessed directly from orthography without phonological mediation. Experiment 1, however, replicated the findings of Van Orden (1987) th at subjects made more false-positive errors on homophone foils than th ey did on nonhomophone controls in a semantic decision task, although they did so only when the foils were orthographically similar to the c orrect exemplars, which indicates both orthographic and phonological a ctivations of meaning. Experiment 2 showed the same results when subje cts were not required to pronounce the target words after semantic dec isions, which indicates automatic phonological activation of kanji wor ds. In Experiment 3, under pattern-masking conditions, this homophony effect was reduced but remained on errors, and the orthographic-simila rity effect remained strong on both homophone and nonhomophone foils. These results suggest that both orthography and phonology play an impo rtant role in the comprehension of kanji words.