Chinese Character Phonological Factors Phonetic components vary in regularity of correspondence between their sound value and that of the whole character, and this correspondence regularity for a given character and its phonogram is known as phonological regularity. The degree of regularity varies from direct tonal and segmental correspondence, mere segmental correspondence (e.g., 艮 [gèn] cf. 根[gēn]), correspondence of only initial segments or only rhyme portions (e.g.,艮[gèn] cf. 很[hěn]), to only an approximate correspondence between the phonetic and the character (e.g., 生([shēng], birth, born),星([xīng], star)). The most frequent characters tend to have more irregular phonetic correspondences, while the less frequent characters tend to be more regular. Another factor in phonological processing is consistency, i.e., how often a phonogram corresponds to a given character pronunciation, as expressed as a ratio of the target pronunciation over other pronunciations of the phonogram family. For example, the consistency of 生[shēng] to 星[xīng] would be represented as a ratio of 星[xīng[ over other pronunciations of characters with 生 in the 生 phonogram family. Studies of phonological regularity and consistency have typically treated regularity as a categorical variable consisting of different types of whole syllable correspondence, and consistency as a ratio index for a character out of a phonogram family. However, such approaches potentially miss a meaningful dimension, in that these correspondences may differ for onsets or rimes, or occasionally, both (e.g., the 生[shēng] - 星[xīng] pair show both onset and rime differences). Lack of phonogram-character correspondences are often due to historical changes in the language that affected rimes and onsets separately, and affected different groups of phonemes at different times. Hence, it is possible that separate onset and rime regularity effects, and separate onset and rime consistency effects, could be involved. Separate sets of onset and rime regularity and consistency data will be entered the model to examine the possibility that regularity and consistency could be multi-dimensional variables (at least separate onset and rime dimensions), rather than unidimensional, whole-syllable effects. Prev