Processing phonetic radicals of Chinese characters in a sentence: Data from Cantonese speakers

Abstract

A Chinese phonogram consists of a semantic radical and a phonetic radical. The latter provides the phonological cue for the whole character and can also be used as a single character. The dual-route access hypothesis suggests two routes when we access the meaning of a word, one directly accessing the meaning through orthography and another through both orthography and phonology (Coltheart et al., 1993). It remains unknown whether the phonetic radicals are at work when processing Chinese characters, especially in the context of sentence processing (Ren et al., 2017).