Abstract: Using the procedures provided by S. M. Condry and A. Levy (1979), we had 30 primary school pupils of the fifth grade and 30 college students to judge the graphic, phonetic or semantic similarities of Chinese characters under different distracting conditions such as their being similar in look, sound or meaning. The result shows that the differences between college students and schoolchildren in the reaction time of making similarity judgments are significant. The R. T in the same age group in making similarity judgement of characters that look similar is the shortest, with those similar in sound taking a longer RT, and the synonyms taking the longest. The RT difference between the second and third catagories are not significant. The result also shows that the distractive effect of graphic similarity on synonym judgement is greater than that of phonetic similarity. On the basis of these results, the authors hold that coding sound may not be a necessary step in assessing meaning. In addition to the graphic-phonetic-semantic channel in information processing of Chinese characters, the graphicsemantic channel must also be available.

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