On processing Chinese ideographs and English words: Some implications from Stroop-test results

When Chinese subjects tried to name the color of characters which represented conflicting color words, they showed markedly greater interference than did English speaking readers performing an English version of the same task. This effect cannot be attributed to bilingualism among the Chinese subjects since bilinguals in other languages show smaller Stroop-interference than monolingual controls. Instead, there may be some fundamental differences in the perceptual demands of reading Chinese and English which can have widespread implications for human information processing.