Consistency effects on lexical decision and naming of two-character Chinese words

This study with three experiments examined the notion inherent in the Interactive Constituency Model of Perfetti and colleagues [Perfetti, C.A., Liu, Y. & Tan, L.H. (2002) In H.S.R. Kao, C.K. Leong & D.-G. Gao (Eds.), Cognitive neuroscience studies of the Chinese language (pp. 35-60). Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press; Perfetti, C.A. & Tan, L.H. (1999) In J. Wang, A.W. Inhoff & H.-C. Chen (Eds.), Reading Chinese script: A cognitive analysis (pp. 115-134). Mahwah, New Hersey: Lawrence Erlbaum] that in reading 2-character Chinese words phonology is activated at the character level rather than at the word level. Specifically, the effect of phonological inconsistency (multiple pronunciations) of constituent characters on the visual recognition of 2-character Chinese words found by Tan and Perfetti (Experiment 2) [(1999) Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 25, 382-393] was further tested in 2 lexical decision experiments (1 and 2a) with sample sizes of 42 and 47 native Cantonese-speaking Chinese university students. Using the same stimulus materials with some needed slight variations, the two experiments found the target items with the constituent inconsistent characters were processed faster than the control two-character words with consistent characters and this inconsistency effect of hetero-phonic homographs would still be compatible with character-level phonology. The words with the consistent constituent character on the left (inconsistency on the right constituent) were processed faster than those with the consistent constituent character on the right (inconsistency on the left constituent). In Experiment 2b the control or consistent words were named faster than the corresponding inconsistent words and there was no left-right positional difference for the inconsistency. Taken together, the two lexical decision experiments and the naming experiment uphold the generality of character-level consistency effect of heterophonic homographs, even though there are some slight variations from the original study.