PHONOLOGICAL AND SEMANTIC ACTIVATION IN READING KANJI CHARACTERS

In a large proportion of the complex kanji characters resulting from the combination of two radicals, the left radicals gives information about the meaning of the whole character, and the right one gives cues to pronunciation. In this study, this feature was exploited to investigate the relative contribution of semantic and phonological information in the process of recognizing a word written in kanji. In 2 experiments, a technique was used in which part of the target character (i.e., the left radical, carrying the semantic information; the right, phonetic radical, or a fragment) was presented shortly (60 or 180 ms stimulus onset asynchrony [SOA]) before the exposure of the whole character, which had to be named as fast as possible. Earlier exposure of the phonetic radical produced facilitation of the naming response, which was stronger at the 180-ms SOA than at the 60-ms SOA, whereas preexposure of the semantic radical had a weak facilitatory effect at the 60-ms SOA and some inhibition at the 180-ms SOA.