This study, employing unmasked priming lexical decision tasks, examines the possible effects of the phonogram properties on the representation of Chinese phonograms and their radicals. In Experiment 1, the representation of radicals (semantic radical and phonetic radical) and their host phonograms is compared under various phonograms types. Experiment 2 utilizes synonyms of semantic radicals and homophones to phonetic radicals as targets to further investigate whether the activation of radicals involves the representation of phonetic and semantic information. The representation of phonograms forms a continuum modulated by the phonogram properties. Holistic processing is adopted for familiar phonograms, while for unfamiliar ones, hierarchical processing is a better choice. The processing of radicals is asynchronous, with semantic radicals given processing priority. In the process of phonogram representation, the semantic information of semantic radicals is consistently represented, whereas the phonological information of phonetic radicals may not always be present.