Abstract: Introduction. Much research has shown that, in alphabetic writing systems, words or pseudo-words with large orthographic neighborhood size (N) are pronounced with shorter reaction time (RT) than those with smaller neighborhood size. However, it is not known whether the same effect can be found in the Chinese writing system since Chinese characters are not composed by “letters” which are commonly found in alphabetic writing systems. Eighty and half percent of the Chinese characters are semantic-phonetic compound characters comprising a semantic radical and a phonetic radical. Phonetic radicals indicate the phoneme of the characters, and in Chinese many characters have the same phonetic radical. For example, characters such as “炬、距、钜、拒、讵、柜” have the same phonetic radical “巨”. Although words like “柜” [gui4] do not have the same phoneme as other words mentioned above, it is only an irregular word. It is thus obvious that the Chinese writing system also contains orthographic neighborhood. The present study aimed to investigate whether the N effect existed in Chinese, and if it did, whether the effect was different between the Chinese and alphabetic writing systems.
Method. A total of 29 undergraduate students (13 men, 16 women) from Beijing Normal University participated in the present study. All of them were native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. The experiment was run on a notebook PC using E-Prime software. A fixation point “+” was presented on the screen for 500ms, then the target character was displayed. Subjects were asked to read aloud the character as quickly and accurately as possible.
Results and conclusion. The N effect was found when considering both RT and number of errors, but this effect was opposite to that found in the English writing systems, with a smaller neighborhood size leading to shorter RT. More studies should be initiated in order to make cross-language comparisons of the N effect

Key words: semantic-phonetic compound character, reading aloud, phonology of characters, neighborhood size, N effect