Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The nature of sublexical processing in reading logographic Chinese was investigated in three primed naming experiments. Experiment 1 showed that phonetic radicals in low frequency complex characters are automatically decomposed and used to activate their own phonological representations. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that the semantic properties of these phonetic radicals are also activated. It is argued that sublexical processing in reading Chinese is both a phonological and a semantic event and there is no fundamental difference between sublexical processing of phonetic radicals and lexical processing of single and complex charaaers. The implications of these results for theories of lexical processing are discussed.