| The research described in this thesis explores the role of phonology in Chinese word recognition from the perspective of phonetically-informed phonology. Specifically, it addresses the controversial question of whether Chinese readers use phonological information in Chinese word identification, an unresolved issue that has motivated numerous studies with conflicting results. In an online visual lexical decision task, 30 native Chinese-speaking participants were asked to (i) read stimuli from two frequency- and-complexity-matched groups of Chinese characters that varied in phonological complexity and phonetic duration; and (ii) to indicate whether they were real Chinese characters (as opposed to pseudo-characters included in the stimuli). The results show that readers differ in their use of phonological information, depending on their level of fluency, as determined by a Chinese reading fluency test (adapted from the Reading Fluency subtest of the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Achievement-III): subjects whose fluency scores were in the top one-third had significantly longer latencies to the long-duration stimuli than to the short-duration stimuli, while subjects at lower reading fluency levels (i.e., below the top third) showed no significant differences in their reaction times to long-duration stimuli and short-duration stimuli. I interpret these findings to mean that activation of phonology in Chinese word recognition is contingent on a reader’s reading skills, that is, phonology is activated for readers of higher reading skills but not for readers of lower reading skills. It is suggested that the integration of phonology with other components of a word’s representation, which only readers of higher reading fluency level achieve, contributes to the involvement of phonology in Chinese word identification and that phonology is a “nurtured”, as opposed to automatic, element in Chinese word recognition. |
