Phonological processes in reading Chinese characters.

Native chinese speakers participated in character identification tasks that differ in the extent to which they involve prelexical vs, postlexical phonological processes. A backward visual masking procedure previously found to show prelexical phonemic effect in English failed to produce such effects in reading chinese characters. Two priming experiments, by contrast, found evidence of semantic and phonological priming in the identification of masked characters (experiment 3) and in speed of character naming (experiment 4)