Abstract: Using the modified moving-window display technique, two experiments were carried out toinvestigate orthographic and phonological processing during Chinese reading and comprehension. Acritical character in each of the experimental passages was manipulated to be either intact,orthographically similar, homophonic, or totally dissimilar to the original character. In Experiment l,only the pointed character was shown, whereas one character to its left and two characters to its rightwere also displayed in degraded quality in Experiment 2. The profiles of the homophonic condition werethe same as those of the dissimilar condition and the orthographically similar-condition at the early stageof processing in both experiments 1 and 2, such that they all deviated from the profile of the intactcondition. Experiment 2 further showed that the violation effects in the dissimilar condition lasted longerthan those in both the homophonic condition and the orthographically similar condition. These results didnot support the notion that phonology played an early and constructive role during Chinese reading,although phonology may have been useful for the recovery of lexical impairment. The minororthographic difference between the intact words and the orthographically similar words was sufficient toproduce a substantial impairment suggesting that orthographic information played an important role inreading Chinese.

Key words: Lexical processing, orthographic processing, philological processing, Chinese reading