Reading Chinese characters for meaning: the role of phonological information

Two experiments with the Stroop paradigm were conducted to investigate the role of phonological codes in access to the meaning of Chinese characters. Subjects named the ink color of viewed characters or color patches. Key ite ms were color characters, their homophones with the same tone, homophones w ith different tones, and semantic associates. Apart from finding the usual Stroop interference effect, homophones produced significant interference in the incongruent condition, provided that they had the same tone as the col or characters. The interference effect from homophones, however, was signif icantly smaller than that from color characters. Semantic associates genera ted an interference effect in the incongruent condition, an effect of the s ame magnitude as the effect from the same-tone homophones. Finally, in the congruent conditions, all the key items yielded facilitations compared to n eutral controls, though the facilitation from color characters was larger t han the facilitations from other types of characters. These findings sugges t that phonological codes in Chinese are activated obligatorily and provide early sources of constraint in access to meaning. (C) 2000 Elsevier Scienc e B.V. All rights reserved.