Lexical activation during the recognition of Chinese characters: Evidence against early phonological activation

In two primed-naming experiments involving Chinese character recognition, o ne with native Mandarin-speaking subjects and another with native Cantonese -speaking subjects, we varied both the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) and the prime-target similarity along various lexical dimensions. Across both e xperiments, the results were as follows: (1) Relatively strong and reliable semantic priming appeared very early across various SOAs, and its onset wa s not affected by meaning precision, (2) either homophonic priming had negl igible effects on target naming or the effects appeared relatively late (on ly at 57 msec), and (3) graphic inhibition was found across different SOAs. Since the same set of stimuli and procedure were adopted as those in the s tudy of Perfetti and Tan (1998), the present findings raise questions about the reliability and validity of the results from their study that have bee n used to support the notion that phonology is a constitutive element of ch aracter recognition and precedes meaning access in the identification proce ss. Instead, the present results suggest that phonology is optional for acc essing meaning in Chinese character recognition among skilled adult readers .