Submorphemic processing in reading Chinese

Three experiments are reported here to address the question of whether submorphemic information isinvolved in the recognition of Chinese characters. A character decision task was used in which frequency characteristics of the radicals within a character and radical status of the components within a noncharacter were manipulated. The frexlueney of the fight-hand radical affected responses to 2-radical characters, whereas the radical status of both left and right components affected noncharaeter responses. Furthermore, the impact of radical frequency was shown to be sensitive to radical position. For 3-radical characters, it appeared that the frequency of a compound radical (composed of 2 subradicals) had no effect on responses, whereas the frequency of the subradicals did. It is concluded that all simple radicals are independently activated inthe process of character recognition. Compound radicals are not activated in this way despite their common occurrence. The results are considered within a multilevel interactive-activation framework incorporating position sensitivity. In recent years, there has been considerable interest in the question of which orthographic components of a word are involved in the process of visually recognizing that word. Examples of-components that have been examined in alphabetic scripts are morphemes (e.g., Henderson, 1985; Taft, 1985) and submorphemic units like bodies or rimes (i.e., that part of a monosyllabic morpheme that does not include the initial consonants, like the EAM of STREAM; fo