The role of radical processing in Chinese character recognition was investigated in five experiments using a lexical decision task. The stimuli were horizontally structured Chinese characters, each containing two radical components. We demonstrated that lexical decision performance was affected by the semantic relatedness between radicals and characters, the lexical status of radicals, and the type frequency of radicals. In addition, the effects of these factors only manifested in the recognition of low frequency characters. These results are in line with an interactive activation view of character recognition.

Key wards: radical processing, Chinese character recognition, lexical decision