Masked phonological priming in reading Chinese words depends on the task

In two masked priming experiments with Chinese characters, orthographic priming effects were observed in lexical decision and naming tasks despite the fact that the primes were phonologically unrelated to the target characters. In contrast, phonological priming was found only in naming, a task that explicitly required a vocal response. No additional priming effects were obtained for masked primes that were simultaneously visually similar and phonologically identical to the targets. The data suggest that the recovery of lexical information for Chinese characters does not depend on the prior activation of phonological information.