Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether phonological information was activated during semantic processing of hanja. In these experiments, both using a semantic categorization task, the performance of skilled hanja readers were compared with that of less-skilled hanja readers. The less-skilled hanja readers were found to produce more false positive categorization errors on homophone foils, as well as on graphically similar foils, than the errors on their controls. Thus phonological and visual information appear to affect the semantic task. However, skilled hanja readers were found to produce no phonological effect and no visual similarity effect. This indicates that phonological and visual information do not seem to affect the semantic task. Therefore, the present results suggest that the use of phonological and visual information depends on reading proficiency. Phonological activation appears to be an optional rather than obligatory process.