Abstract: Using lexical decision task, the experiment was designed to test whe-ther feature analysis is a necessary stage of visual recognition process ofChinese characters and whether phonetic activation of Chinese charactersocctirs during lexical access (prelexically) or after lexical access (postle-xically). The results showed that the multi-pronunciation character of the pri-ming word helped not only the judgement of the target item consistentwith the appropriate pronunciation of multi-pronunciation character, butalso the judgement of the target item consistent with the inappropriatepronunciation of multi-pronunciation character and the judgement of tar-get items of similar grapheme. We take the result to suggest that the fea-ture analysis is a necessary stage in visual recognition processes of Chi-nese characters and the phonetic properties of familiar Chinese words havebeen activated automatically before they reach mental lexicon.

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