VISUAL CHINESE CHARACTER-RECOGNITION - DOES PHONOLOGICAL INFORMATION MEDIATE ACCESS TO MEANING

Recent evidence demonstrates early phonological processes during the i dentification of Chinese words. Evidence on whether such processes ''m ediate'' access to Chinese word meaning is less clear. The present stu dies investigated mediation; using a paradigm which has demonstrated ' 'phonologically mediated priming'' with English words that naming time of a target word (e.g., sand) is facilitated more by a homophone of a semantic associate (e.g., beech) than by a control (e.g., bel?ch) (Le sch & Pollatsek, 1993). Prime-target stimulus onset asynchronies (SOA) varied at 129, 243, and 500 ms. In the 129- and 243-ms SOA conditions , critical results involved the role of homophone density in naming Ch inese words: (1) Homophones of synonyms facilitated tar et identificat ion for primes with few homophones, bur not for primes with many homop hones. (2) Synonym primes facilitated naming in all conditions, but th e effect was reduced when primes had many homophones. (3) Synonym prim ing was greater than homophone priming across SOAs of 129 and 243 ms. At the 500-ms SOA, however, only synonyms facilitated target recogniti on. These results suggest that phonological information is best though t of as a spreading activation that is shared among written units, wit h mediation, in the classic sense, restricted to cases in which this a ctivation is distributed among relatively few units. Implications for a model of Chinese reading and the general concept of mediation are di scussed. (C) 1997 Academic Press.