中  華  心  理  學  刊
民92，45卷，1期，29-46

In-Mao Liu（Department of Psychology, National Chung-Cheng University；Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University）；Sau-chin Chen（Department of Psychology, National Chung-Cheng University ）；Iue-ruey Sue（Department of Psychology, National Chung-Cheng University ）

Abstract

In alphabetic languages, the consistency in spelling-sound correspondences is defined by the neighborhood size of similarly spelled words (i.e., with the same word-body) with the same pronunciation. It is sometimes defined in terms of grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) rules. There is no dispute as to how to define regularity and consistency in Chinese, because both are defined in terms of phonetic radicals (phonetics), which are comparable to word-bodies in alphabetic languages. Depending on the radical-sound relationship, three dimensions of consistency in radical-sound correspondences may be defined. Three types of irregularity may be defined: heterophonous, non-phonetic, and non-homophonous. The existence of separate dimensions of consistency makes it possible to pit consistency against various types of regularity. It was found that the consistency effect generally appears in naming latencies and that the regularity effect appears in naming errors. Since the large majorities of naming errors represent retrieval errors, it is reasoned that alternative pronunciations compete at the time of retrieval rather than during processing in naming a target character. The regularity effect as showing a tendency to make more errors for irregular than for regular characters signifies that pronounceable/compatible phonetics may aid the acquisition of regular characters in people's early childhood.

Keywords：Consistency effects, Regularity effects, Chinese character naming, Spelling-sound correspondences, Radical-sound correspondences, Pronunciation by retrieval