Abstract
According to the orthographic depth hypothesis, automatic phonological activation is not assumed when reading deep orthographies. However, some previous studies have suggested the possibility of automatic phonological activation even for deep orthographies, such as Chinese and Japanese Kanji words. In order to examine whether automatic phonological activation arises when reading Kanji words, this study attempts to examine whether a priming effect can be observed for homophonic Kanji word pairs using lexical decision task with masked primes. Significant homophone priming effects are observed using two different sets of stimulus pairs. Thus, in contrast to the orthographic depth hypothesis, these results clearly indicate that phonological activation automatically arises when reading Kanji compound words.
