Abstract: One experiment was conducted to probe the following issues: (1). Is the phonological processing in Chinese character identification a multi-level (character level and sub-character level) activation processing? (2). Whether the multi-level phonological processing is general in both high and low frequency character identification, (3). How is the interaction of phonological activation of character level and sub-character level? Using W+, W+ C+, W+ C-, W- C+ and W- C- as primes and naming as task, at 3 kinds of SOA (57ms, 85ms & 143ms), the experiment results showed that at the early stage of character identification, both high and low frequency primes showed priming effect, At 57ms SOA, the primes showed significant priming effect on target identification, and both the whole characters and their phonetics contributed to the priming effects. The interaction between whole characters and their phonetics was determined by their related frequency, and we assumed that the interaction was run by the principles of "whole characters dominating" and "high frequency dominating".

Key words: phonological processing, phonological access, whole character dominantes principle, high frequency dominates principle