Abstract
This paper addresses differences in responses to the Navon task in reading Japanese hiragana characters. We devised the hiragana reading tasks for global and local-features drawing on Navon (1977). Differences in participants' latency for the global-response and the local-response were examined as a function of figurative and phonological features of the global-local stimuli combinations. For the global-response task, the response to the figuratively similar trials were much slower than for both the vowel and consonant match trials as well as for identical trials; however, responses to both the vowel and consonant match trials did not differ from the identical trials. On the other hand, for the local-response task, the response to the figurative similar trials, the vowel match and consonant match trials were much slower than for the identical trials. The results indicate that phonological information appeared to have an influence on the tasks that require attending to the local information, but not to the global information.
