Abstract
Two priming experiments were conducted to investigate whether graphemic information of a kanji character could be acquired in the parafovea. In this study, information about a radical (Experiment 1) and global shape information (Experiment 2) were regarded as graphemic information of a kanji character. In the experiments, a prime stimulus was presented at the parafovea and then a target stimulus was at the fovea, and subjects were required to make the lexical decision of the target. In experiment 1, the kanji recognition was facilitated at 5 deg of visual angle (5 character spaces) of the prime when the prime and the target were identical, but not even at 3 deg (3 character spaces) when the prime and the target shared the same radical. In experiment 2, facilitation was observed at 8 deg (8 character spaces) when the global shape of the prime was similar to that of the target. These results suggest that detail information of kanji characters could be acquired to some extent at 5 deg of visual angle and that global shape information could be at least at 8 deg.
