Spatial Stroop interference occurs in the processing of radicals of ideogrammic compounds

In this study, we investigated whether the meanings of radicals are involved in reading ideogrammic compounds in a spatial Stroop task. We found spatial Stroop effects of similar size for the simple characters (“up”) and (“down”) and for the complex characters (“nervous”) and (“nervous”), which are ideogrammic compounds containing a radical or , in Experiments 1 and 2 . In Experiment 3 , the spatial Stroop effects were also similar for the simple characters (“east”) and (“west”) and for the complex characters (“state”) and (“spray”), which contain and as radicals. This outcome occurred regardless of whether the task was to identify the character (Exps. 1 and 3 ) or its location (Exp. 2 ). Thus, the spatial Stroop effect emerges in the processing of radicals just as it does for processing simple characters. This finding suggests that when reading ideogrammic compounds, (a) their radicals’ meanings can be processed and (b) ideogrammic compounds have little or no influence on their radicals’ semantic processing.