Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Many Chinese characters consist of probabilistic cues to meaning or pronunciation. We investigated whether readersautomatically activate the semantics associated with a familiar phonetic even when it is putatively irrelevant. In a lexicaldecision task, primes were semantically related to the overall character, the sub-lexical component, or not related to either.Latencies were significantly faster when primes were related to the meaning of the phonetic and related to the meaningof the entire target as compared to unrelated prime-target pairs. The magnitudes of the priming effects were larger forlower frequency targets. Results indicate that readers activate the semantics of a phonetic even when it is unrelated to themeaning of the character. This suggests that the irrelevant semantics may influence the meaning of a character, and alsochallenges standard analyses in which such characters are considered morphemes because phonetics can also contribute tomeaning.