Abstract: Using different tasks, the time course of graphic, phonological, semantic information activation during Chinese low frequency characters recognition was investigated in two priming-category judgement experiments based individually on the semantic (Experiment 1) and phonological information. (Experiment 2) In Experiment 1, the graphic priming appeared at 43ms SOA, phonological and semantic priming appeared simultaneously at 85ms and 145msSOA. In Experiment 2, the graphic priming appeared at 43-ms SOA, phonological and semantic priming appeared at 57-ms, 85-ms and145-ms SOA. The two experiments showed: (1) for low-frequency Chinese characters, graphic information was first activated; the phonological and semantic activation could not separate obviously. (2) The order of the graphic, phonological and semantic activation did not depend on the tasks we had used

Key words: Chinese character identification, graphic, phonological, semantic, frequency, time