Abstract

In Korean written language there are Chinese homophones which have different Chinese characters but have the same sound in Korean spoken language. So those Chinese homophones are orthographically unambiguous but phonologically ambiguous to Korean. Using the Chinese homophones and Chinese-character-nonwords which had the same sound as Chinese homophones in Korean language, lexical decision task and sentence meaningfulness judgement task were performed to Korean subjects to examine the nature of phonological coding during reading of Chinese-character-words. Subjects made lexical decisions to Korean target words which were associates of the orthographically-related meaning or phonologically-related meaning of a Chinese homophone prime or phonologically-related meaning of a chinese-character-nonword prime. Results indicated that orthographically-related prime words and both of phonologically-related prime words and nonwords showed facilitative effects on lexical decisions, suggesting that prelexical phonological codes were generated during silent reading. And the effects of the former condition were larger than those of both of latter conditions, suggesting that direct access to lexical representations without mediation of prelexical code was also available. But results of sentence meaningfulness judgement task were contrary to those of lexical decision task. Subjects gave sentence meaningfulness judgements on sentences each of which involved a Chinese-character word or nonword. Contextually these were orthographically-inappropriate but phonologically-appropriate words or nonwords, or phonologically-inappropriate words(control condition), Significant results were found only on error rate measure but not found on RT measure. On error rates inhibitory effects were shown at phonologically-inappropriate word condition but not shown at phonologically-inappropriate nonword condition, suggesting that postlexical phonological codes were generated. It was suggested that the phonological processes when reading Chinese-character-words may be governed by characteristics of task demands.