From orthography to meaning: an electrophysiological investigation of the role of phonology in accessing meaning of Chinese single-character words

Homophone interference effects in Stroop experiments are often taken as evidence for the hypothesis that semantic access in written Chinese language is mediated by activation of phonological processing. We here aim to test this hypothesis with Chinese single-character words by means of event related potential (ERP) recordings. Using color words, homophones of color words and color-word associates as materials in a Stroop task, we found behavioral Stroop interference effects for all stimulus types and an N450 for incongruent color words and color-word associates. Critically, there was no difference in the ERP waveforms elicited by congruent and incongruent homophones in the N450 time window. However, in a later time window (600–800 ms) the incongruent homophones elicited an apparent positivity over left posterior regions. A similar effect was also observed for incongruent color words. These findings thus indicate that phonology does not play an important role in semantic activation of Chinese single-character words, and that the behavioral Stroop effects for homophones possibly arises at later stage of lexical processing.