Abstract: Two lexical--decision experiments were conducted to assess phonological processesin Chinese lexical access. consults of Experiment 1 and 2 were that the lexicaldecision to a target character was not faster when preceded by a rhyming charactercue than when preceded by a phonological--dissimilar character cue. The homophonicpriming effect was obtained in Experiment 2. The effective activation of phonologicalinformation was dependent of the extent of the phonemic similarity between Primesand targets. The possible conclusion was that the phonological activation was anautomatic process in lexical access, which evidence was less obvious in Chinese thanin the alphabetic writing; the access to meaning in Chinese reading maybe relys onthe visual--orthographic properties in a great extent. The study seemed to support thedual-route theory.

Key words: phonemic similarity, rhyming, homophone, priming, dual-route model