The role of phonetic radical information in compound character recognition during sentence reading

The role of phonology in Chinese character recognition has been a subject of ongoing debate. While evidence suggests that phonetic radicals play a significant role in compound character recognition, previous studies have often mixed phonological and orthographic information associated with radicals. To address this limitation, two eye-tracking experiments were conducted to further investigate the role of phonetic radical phonology and the time course of its influence on character recognition. In Experiment 1, we employed an error disruption paradigm to explore the role of phonology in Chinese character recognition. The results revealed that, for regular target characters, the total reading time was shorter in the phonologically similar substitute condition compared to the unrelated condition. The findings suggest that phonological information facilitates Chinese character recognition, but only in the late processing stages. In Experiment 2, the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm was utilized to investigate how phonetic radical information influences the recognition of compound characters. Results showed that, regardless of a character’s regularity, the single fixation duration, first fixation duration, and gaze duration were all shorter in the phonologically similar condition than in the unrelated condition. The findings suggest that phonetic radical phonology consistently facilitates the processing of Chinese characters, both in the early and late stages. This study offers new insights into the phonological processing of Chinese characters, particularly highlighting the crucial role of radicals in decoding word meanings and emphasizing the importance of sub-lexical processing in reading comprehension.