| Reading research has shown that phonological processes play a fundamental role in word identification, memory, and language comprehension. In this dissertation, I explore the generality of phonological processes in terms of writing system comparison and phonological activation in reading Chinese and English.; The English writing system is basically characterized by systematic correspondences between letters and phonemes. Chinese writing system consists of Phonological and semantic information for some characters, but not for all. If phonological processes are found in phonologically-opaque Chinese, this would provide evidence for the universality of phonological activation. Three experiments employed a homophone judgement task and a synonym judgment task.; In Experiment 1 with Chinese materials, subjects showed a phonological interference effect in a synonym judgment task. Participants were slower and more errorful when the stimuli had the same pronunciation, even though the task required a semantic judgment. No semantic interference effect was observed in the homophone judgment task. These results suggest that readers could suppress semantics when two characters were presented simultaneously, but they couldn't suppress phonological processing. Phonological processes are independent of memory demands.; Experiment 2, also with Chinese materials, indicates that phonological processes non-optionally occur in reading high and low frequency characters, and phonograms and non-phonograms. Analogous to English, the effects of phonology were stronger for lower frequency than higher frequency characters.; Experiment 3, with English stimuli, failed to find phonological interference in the synonym judgment task and semantic interference in the homophone judgment task. The confounding of graphemes and phonemes and the high level knowledge about orthography interactively affect subject's response that allow subjects to fall back on graphic feature processing as much as they can.; The cross writing system comparisons suggest that phonological processes reflect a general reading principle and the orthographic characteristics of writing system can influence response strategies. With regard to Chinese itself, I conclude that the Chinese writing system not only presents semantic information, but it also presents phonological information that make important contributions to the reading process. Thus, this dissertation provides further evidence that Chinese cannot be viewed as a visual-only writing system as far as the reader is concerned. |
