The inconsistency of consistency effects in reading: the case of Japanese kanji phonology

Most Japanese Kanji characters have several different pronunciations, at least one ON-reading (of Chinese origin) and a KUN-reading (of Japanese origin); the appropriate pronunciation is determined by intraword wntext. There are also Kanji characters that have a single ON-reading and no KUN-reading. With 2-character ON-reading Kanji words as stimuli, naming experiments were carried out to investigate print-to-sound consistency effects. The consistent Kanji words were those in which neither constituent character had an alternative ON-reading or a KUN-reading, hence there can be no pronunciation ambiguity for these words. The inconsistent items were ON-reading words composed of characters that have KUN-readings that are appropriate to other words in which the characters occur, hence there should be some ambiguity about the pronunciation of the constituent characters. Six experiments yielded reliable effects of both word and character frequency and familiarity on speed and accuracy of word naming but virtually no evidence for consistency effects. It was concluded that for Kanji, phonology is dominantly computed at the word rather than at the character level.