Semantic activation of phonetic radicals in Chinese ideophonetic compound processing

Abstract The phonetic radicals embedded in Chinese ideophonetic compounds serve as indicators of the ideophonetic compounds’ pronunciations. The mainstream research, therefore, has focused on the phonological activation of the phonetic radicals and their contribution to the host ideophonetic compounds’ phonological processing. The present study, however, by employing a primed part-of-speech judgment task and manipulating the phonetic regularity variable, examined phonetic radicals’ semantic , instead of phonological, activation as well as the role of phonetic regularity in the processing of the host ideophonetic compounds. These results endorsed the presence of the semantic activation of phonetic radicals, refuting the influence of phonetic regularity on their activation. Conversely, they affirm that phonetic regularity could modulate the semantic activation of the entire ideophonetic compound.