1998 Volume 17 Issue 1 Pages 27-35
Two priming experiments were conducted to investigate phonological processing of parafoveally presented kanji words. In the experiments, a prime stimulus in the parafovea was followed by a target stimulus in the fovea, and subjects made the lexical decision of the target. The primes and the targets were two-character kanji words or nonwords. In experiment 1, the prime that shared the first character with the target word facilitated processing of the target word even if pronunciations of the first characters were not the same. On the contrary, facilitation was not observed when the first characters of the prime and the target word were different even if they were pronounced the same. In experiment 2, facilitation was observed when the prime was a homophone of the target word even if the prime shared no character with the target word. These results suggest that phonological information of a kanji word but not of its constituent character is acquired in the parafovea and is used to help to identify a word that is later presented in the fovea.
