The role of phonological activation in the visual semantic retrieval of Chinese characters.
The Stroop paradigm was used to examine the role of phonological activation in semantic access and its development in reading Chinese characters. Subjects (age 7-23 years) of different reading ability were asked to name the display color of Chinese characters. The characters were displayed in four different colors: red, yellow, blue and green. There were five types of relationships between a character and its display color: semantically congruent, phonologically congruent, semantically incongruent, phonologically incongruent and neutral. In addition to the classical Stroop effects, interference and facilitation effects from the homophones of color characters were also observed. The younger children and those with lower reading ability exhibited stronger Stroop effects. These findings suggest that phonological codes are activated automatically in Chinese character recognition. Furthermore, there is more phonological activation in the semantic retrieval of children in lower grades and those with lower reading ability.
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, Beijing Normal University, Beijing 100875, China.
Taomei
T
Guo
Danling
D
Peng
Ying
Y
Liu
D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002648:Child; D002681:China; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D010700:Phonetics; D011578:Psycholinguistics; D011930:Reaction Time; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D014796:Visual Perception