Phonological, not semantic, activation dominates Chinese character recognition: Evidence from a visual world eye-tracking study

Combining eye-tracking technique with a revised visual world paradigm, this study examined how positional, phonological, and semantic information of radicals are activated in visual Chinese character recognition. Participants’ eye movements were tracked when they looked at four types of invented logographic characters including a semantic radical in the legal (e.g., [Formula: see text]) and illegal positions ([Formula: see text]), a phonetic radical in the legal (e.g., [Formula: see text]) and illegal positions (e.g., [Formula: see text]). These logographic characters were presented simultaneously with either a sound-cued (e.g., /qiao2/) or meaning-cued (e.g., a picture of a bridge) condition. Participants appeared to allocate more visual attention towards radicals in legal, rather than illegal, positions. In addition, more eye fixations occurred on phonetic, rather than on semantic, radicals across both sound- and meaning-cued conditions, indicating participants’ strong preference for phonetic over semantic radicals in visual character processing. These results underscore the universal phonology principle in processing non-alphabetic Chinese logographic characters.