this article was supported by National Science Foundation Grant SBR-9616519. We are grateful to Max Coltheart, Laurie Feldman, Rumjahn Hoosain, Yuriko Kayamoto, and Sandy Pollatsek for their thoughtful comments. We thank Li Long for her assistance in recruiting participants in Beijing. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Li Hal Tan or Charles A. Perfetti, Learning Research and Development Center, 3939 O'Hara Street, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 15260. Electronic mall may be sent to tanlh@hkucc.hku.hk. Recent research with Chinese single-character words, however, has suggested a stronger role for phonology in Chinese reading. In a primed perceptual-identification paradigm, Perfetti and Zhang (1991, Experiment 3) observed a synchrony of phonologic and semantic priming effects when a single-character prime was exposed for 50 ms, followed by a character target of 35 ms. Using a backward-masking procedure, Tan, Hoosain, and Peng (1995) exposed a target character for 60 ms, followed by a mask character that was presented for 40 ms. As in Perfetti and Zhang's experiment, they found no evidence for semantic effects in the absence of phonological effects. Equally interesting, when the target character had vague meaning, they found phonological effects in the absence of semantic effects. Such results suggest a very rapid activation of phonology and are not consistent with a meaning-first hypothesis (see Tan & Perfetti, 1998, for a detailed review of recent discoveries). The generality of these demonstrations of phonology is limited, however, because the research has used exclusively single-character words. Estimates of modem Chinese show that multiple-character words are actually more common than single-character words. According to...

Phonological codes as early sources of constraint in Chinese word identification: A review of current discoveries and theoretical accounts