1992 Volume 10 Issue 2 Pages 109-113
Two experiments were conducted to investigate how graphemic information was used in phonemic processing of Chinese characters (kanji). Complex character composed of a "radical" and a "phonetic" was selected as stimuli. Subjects performed a phonemical matching task in which they were required to decide whether a pair of characters presented sequentially are phonemically identical or not. The result of Experiment 1 showed that RTs of the matching task were faster when the same characters or a pair of characters containing the same "phonetic" were presented. In Experiment 2, it was shown that RT was not facilitated when pairs of characters were those which contained the same "phonetic" but not in the normal position, the right. These results were interpreted as suggesting that "phonetic" which was placed on the right side of character is used for phonemic processing of characters.
