Subword activation in reading Japanese single Kanji character words

Kanji are categorized into four types based on the combination of "subword validity" (when the right phonemic radical represents the same On reading as the whole Kanji character) and "radical-neighbor consistency" (when the whole Kanji character represents the same On reading with all its neighbor characters). The study demonstrated that both subword validity and radical-neighbor consistency affect naming latencies and error rates for relatively high-frequency Kanji character words. Moreover, both analytic and holistic decoding processes, which correspond to subword and whole-character activation, are used in the naming of Japanese single Kanji character words. Accounts of the findings by dual-route and connectionist models are discussed.