Illusory conjunctions in the perception of Chinese characters.

A Chinese compound character consists of a radical component and a stem component. When compound characters were presented briefly, Ss often reported seeing illusory recombinations of radicals and stems. A series of 5 experiments suggested that the probability of seeing illusory characters is not under the direct influence of lexicality, pronounceability, or character frequency, but depends on 2 factors: (1) familiarity defined in terms of unit frequency, i.e., the frequency of occurrence of a unit either by itself or as part of a larger unit, and (2) the context-dependent perceptual distinctiveness of the components of a given character. It is suggested that the seemingly unreliable lexicality effect obtained in English studies may be reduced to a familiarity effect, and that what McClelland and Mozer (1986) referred to as the surround-similarity effect may be better characterized as an effect of perceptual distinctiveness.