The role of component function in visual recognition of Chinese characters

M. Taft and X. Zhu (1997) reported that character decision latencies to real Chinese characters containing components that entered into many combinations were faster than decision latencies to characters with components that entered into only a small number of combinations. However, this effect was restricted to components that appeared on the right side of Chinese characters. In written Chinese, phonetic components tend to appear on the right, and semantic components tend to appear on the left. Therefore, in Taft and Zhu's study, there was the possibility of a confound between position (left vs. right) and function (semantic vs. phonetic). Results of the present experiment show combinability effects for components with semantic and with phonetic functions. Counter to the claim by Taft and Zhu that component frequency effects are constrained by position, when component function was considered, character decision latencies varied with component frequency but not reliably with position.