Prelexical Phonology by Low Spatial Frequency Channels

Abstract

Whether prelexical phonology exists in a logographic script such as Chinese has long been debated. In contrast to English, there is no explicit grapheme-phoneme correspondence rule for Chinese characters, which makes the idea of prelexical phonology seemingly implausible. To provide a logical basis for prelexical phonology in Chinese character recognition, Chua (1999) proposed two independent routes for Chinese character recognition: one through phonology that is carried by low spatial frequencies, and the other through a lexicon that is carried by high spatial frequencies. The low frequency channels can be activated earlier than the high frequency ones, so the global shape of a character provides the phonological information even before the full identification of the character is possible. In this study, a verification paradigm using four-character idioms was adopted to test Chua's low spatial-frequency mediated phonology model. Three characters of each four-character idiom were presented first, followed by four kinds of foils designed factorially of orthography (similar, dissimilar) × homophone (yes, no). The accuracy in rejecting orthographically similar or homophonic foils was found lower than their controls when the foils were unfiltered (Experiment 1). The homophone effect was not consistently found when the foils contained only low spatial frequency information (Experiment 2); it was found when low spatial frequency information was absent (Experiment 3); and it was also found when only a middle range of spatial frequencies was intact (Experiment 4). In contrast, the orthography effect was found consistently in all 4 experiments. These results argue against the low-spatial-frequency mediated phonology.