Four experiments were designed to investigate the possible effect of orthographic neighborhood frequency (NF) on Chinese character recognition. Orthographic neighbors were operated under two conditions: stroke based and radical based. With the lexical decision and repeated-matching tasks adopted, the results showed an inhibitory NF effect on…

The picture-word task presents participants with a number of pictured objects together with a written distractor word superimposed upon each picture, and their task is to name the depicted object while ignoring the distractor word. Depending on the specific picture and word combination, various effects, including the identity facilitation effect…

We sought to test a componential model of Chinese written spelling, including the role of orthographic working memory (OWM), among Hong Kong kindergartners. One hundred seventeen kindergartners were recruited. OWM was measured using a visual orthographic judgment and a delayed copying task. Orthographic knowledge, semantic knowledge, and…

Orthographic processing is a construct that encompasses the skills of recognizing, storing, accessing, and applying the print conventions of a writing system. Few studies have investigated orthographic processing in dyslexic children and it is not yet clear whether lexical and sublexical orthographic processing are both impaired in these children.…

Radicals are building blocks of Chinese complex characters and exhibit certain positional, phonological and semantic regularities. This study investigated whether adult non-native learners of Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) were aware of the positional (orthographic), phonological and semantic information of radicals, and whether such…

Most sinograms (i.e., Chinese characters) are phonograms (phonetic compounds). A phonogram is composed of a semantic radical and a phonetic radical, with the former usually implying the meaning of the phonogram, and the latter providing cues to its pronunciation. This study focused on the sub-lexical processing of semantic radicals which are…

The purpose of this research was to understand better how morphemic units are encoded and auto-organised in memory and how they are accessed during writing. We hypothesised that the activation of morphemic units would not depend on rule-based learning during primary school but would be determined by frequency-based learning, which is a process…

The purpose of the present study was to investigate developmental differences in lexical processing and sensitivity to the positional information of constituent morphemes with reference to Chinese word-reading ability. One hundred mainland Chinese children (50 second graders and 50 third graders) and 22 high school students were tested with a…

Although research has established that performance on a rapid automatized naming (RAN) task is related to reading, the nature of this relationship is unclear. Bowers (2001) proposed that processes underlying performance on the RAN task and orthographic knowledge make independent and additive contributions to reading performance. We examined the…

In this research, an implicit test using a lexical-decision task, in which words were discriminated from homophonic pseudo-words, was developed to detect the phenomenon of "Chinese orthographic satiation." The phenomenon is defined as a sense of uncertainty of the composition of a well-learned Chinese character through a prolonged visual…

The study uses an orthographic judgment task to evaluate the efficiency of the lexical reading route in Italian dyslexic children. It has been suggested that Italian dyslexic children rely prevalently on the sub-word-level routine for reading. However, it is not easy to test the lexical reading route in Italian directly because of the lack of…

Investigations of reading have focused largely on two component processes, phonological processing and orthographic processing. However, a number of unresolved issues have hampered progress in the investigation of these abilities. Three such issues that formed the focus of the present study were (1) the extent to which tasks used to operationalize…

Two experiments investigated the effect of kanji morphemic homophony on lexical decision and naming. Effects were examined from both the left-hand and right-hand positions of Japanese two-kanji compound words. The number of homophones affected the processing of compound words in the same way for both tasks. For left-hand kanji, fewer morphemic…

Two experiments were conducted in order to explore the role of prefix identification in the reading of Dutch bisyllabic words. Although Dutch orthography is highly regular, several deviations from a one-to-one correspondence exist. A case in point is the grapheme E which can represent the vowels epsilon, e and oe in polysyllabic words. In…

Three experiments were undertaken to examine second and fifth grade Telugu-speaking children's awareness of phonological and orthographic properties of familiar Telugu words. Experiment 1 focused on the strategies the children used in completing word fragments. Experiment 2 examined the children's ability to judge and generate rhyming words, and…