The key process that insures the productivity of Chinese orthography is phonetic compounding. According to some scholars (e.g. Defrancis, 1989), the phonetic component of a phonetic compound is drawn from a finite, limited set of phonetic elements, i.e., a syllabary. Phonetic compounding, however, is a recursive process: A phonetic compound may serve as the phonetic component of another, more complex compound. This implies that there is no finite set of phonetics, and suggests an alternative account: The set of possible phonetics may be simply the entire inventory of Chinese characters. To test the syllabary account, we compared the times required, in a character verification task, to reject three different bogus character types: pseudocompounds legal on both accounts, in which the phonetic is an element occurring as the phonetic in genuine phonetic compounds; pseudocompounds illegal on both accounts, in which the phonetic position is occupied by the combining form of a semantic; and doubtful pseudocompounds, in which the phonetic is a freestanding character that never occurs as the phonetic in a genuine compound. Such a pseudocompound is illegal according to the syllabary account, but legal according to the alternative account. We found that the clearly illegal pseudocompounds were rejected quickly and the clearly legal ones rejected slowly, as both accounts would predict, while the doubtful ones were rejected slowly, as if they, too, were legal, supporting the alternative account rather than the syllabary account.

Key words: writing systems, logography, Chinese characters, phonetic compounds