A novel task was used to examine how sublexical orthographic components are activated in the case of Chinese characters. Participants judged which of the two composing radicals of a horizontal character was displaced in an apparent motion (AM) detection task. The detection performance of semantic and phonetic radicals did not differ in Experiment 1. As additional recognition demands (naming or lexical decision) were imposed in Experiments 2 and 3, participants more efficiently detected the AM of the phonetic radical than the semantic radical when the character frequency was low. These findings demonstrate the usefulness of the AM detection task in probing radical activation. Implications for models of word and Chinese character recognition are also discussed.

Key words: sublexical processing, phonetic radical, semantic radical, word recognition, Chinese character