Sublexical processing in reading Chinese: A development study

Three primed naming experiments were conducted to investigate the developme nt of sublexical processing in reading Chinese. Target characters were eith er homophonic to (Experiments 1 and 2) or semantically related to (Experime nt 3) phonetic radicals embedded in irregular complex characters, but not t o the complex character themselves, For both the third and sixth grade scho ol children, targets were named faster when they were preceded by such comp lex characters than by unrelated primes, although the semantic effect of co mplex characters was not significant for the third grade children. It is ar gued that, from early on in learning to read Chinese, phonetic radicals emb edded in complex characters are decomposed from visual input and used to ac tivate their own phonological and semantic properties, in parallel to the p rocessing of whole characters.