Orthography-to-Semantics Consistency Modulates Phonological Effects in Chinese Character Recognition: A Corpus-Based Investigation

Whether and how phonology contributes to semantic access in visual word recognition has long been a central issue in reading research. From a connectionist perspective, the present study used corpus-based measures to quantify the mappings between orthography, phonology and semantics in Chinese and tested how these mappings predicted performance in a large-scale lexical decision task. The results showed that the contribution of phonology to meaning-related processing in Chinese character recognition is conditional on the reliability of orthography-to-semantics mappings: when these mappings were relatively weak, phonology predicted reaction times more strongly. Further comparison among candidate mappings indicated that neither the phonology-to-semantics mapping nor sublexical phonology-to-orthography feedback interacted with orthography-to-semantics consistency, whereas whole-character phonology-to-orthography feedback did. This effect emerged when orthography-to-semantics consistency was low. These findings provide new evidence for a connectionist account of meaning-related processing in Chinese.