Whole Word, Frequency-General Phonology in Semantic Processing of Chinese Characters

Two experiments were conducted to examine the locus of the phonological and semantic interference effects in Chinese reported by C. A. Perfetti and S. Zhang (1995a). Both experiments found that phonological effects in semantic judgments were general across word frequency and independent of component phonology, thus localizing phonological interfer- ence at the whole-character level. However, effects of component phonology were obtained for low-frequency characters when pronunciation judgments were made. The results are consistent with the assumption that phonology is activated at 2 levels in Chinese reading, 1 at the whole character level and 1 at the phonetic component level. A strong semantic interference was also found in both experiments, implying that both phonology and semantics are automatically activated. The constituency model provides a framework to explain the pervasive word-level phonology seen across writing systems.