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 [symbol: see text] ("up") and [symbol: see text] ("down") and for the complex characters [symbol: see text] ("nervous") and [symbol: see text] ("nervous"), which are ideogrammic compounds containing a radical [symbol: see text] or [symbol: see text], in Experiments 1 and 2. In Experiment 3, the spatial Stroop effects were also similar for the simple characters [symbol: see text] ("east") and [symbol: see text] ("west") and for the complex characters [symbol: see text] ("state") and [symbol: see text] ("spray"), which contain [symbol: see text] and [symbol: see text] 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.