Consistency, frequency, and lexicality effects in naming Japanese Kanji

Japanese Kanji characters have various degrees of consistency of character- sound correspondences in multicharacter words. A word was classified as con sistent, inconsistent typical, or inconsistent atypical dth reference to th e most typical pronunciations for constituent characters among words sharin g the same characters. A nonword was classified as consistent, inconsistent biased, or inconsistent ambiguous according to the degree of pronunciation typicality of its constituent characters in real words. A word-naming expe riment yielded a significant Frequency x Consistency interaction, and a non word-naming experiment yielded significant consistency effects. In addition , both word frequency and lexicality exerted strong effects on efficiency o f naming Kanji character strings. These results demonstrate the influence o f Kanji print-sound correspondences both at subword and whole-word levels.