Role of early presemantic phonological code in Chinese character identification.

A backward-masking procedure was used to examine phonological processing in Chinese character identification. In Experiment 1, the character target and mask were presented for 50 ms and 30 ms, respectively. The results indicated graphic but not phonological nor semantic masks affected target recognition. In Experiment 2, the exposure durations of the target and mask were extended to 60 ms and 40 ms, respectively. We observed a significant phonological mask facilitation effect for high-frequency targets and the absence of semantic mask effect. A postexperiment analysis showed that when the high-frequency targets had well-defined meaning, the semantic masks facilitated target identification, whereas when the high-frequency targets had fuzzy meaning, no significant semantic mask effect was obtained. Results indicate that getting at the phonology of high-frequency characters with fuzzy meaning occurs presemantically. © 1995 American Psychological Association.