Abstract: Most complex Chinese characters are composed of a semantic radical on the left and a phonetic radical on the right, which may provide information concerning the pronunciation of the whole character. A semantic judgement task was used to investigate whether sublexical processing of phonetic radicals embedded in complex characters is purely a phonological event, involving activation of phonological information associated with the phonetic radicals, or whether it is also a semantic event, involving activation of semantic properties related to the radicals, which are meaningful characters on their own. Significant inhibitory effects was found for complex characters whose phonetic radicals were semantically related to the other member of the consecutively presented pair of characters. The magnitude of the inhibitory effects was generally not influenced by the regularity of phonetic radicals in providing phonological information for the whole characters, nor by the presentation order of complex characters and semantic associates of the phonetic radicals. It is argued that, in reading Chinese, phonetic radicals embedded in complex characters are decomposed from visual input and used to activate their own phonological and semantic properties, in parallel to the processing of whole characters.

Key words: reading Chinese, Chinese characters, sublexical processing, phonetic radicals