Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We argue for a view that, for written Chinese, direct visual access is the only way to access information stored in the mental lexicon. Phonology plays no role in initial lexical access and has limited effect on access to lexical semantics. Evidence supporting this view is adduced from three sets of experiments that either failed to detect any phonological effect in lexical access, or failed to prove that the phonological effects obtained are pre-lexical in nature, or demonstrate successfully the presence of orthographic effect in lexical access. We conclude that words in the lexicon can be accessed in different ways, depending on the general configurations of the writing systems in different languages.