Research on the phonetic consistency effect in Chinese began in the 1980s. For nearly forty years, the consistency effect, as well as its implications for Chinese character recognition, has been frequently examined. This article presents the debate over the consistency effect in Chinese character recognition. While some research supported the involvement of prelexical phonology and sublexical processing based on the presence of consistency effects, others argued against these accounts by revealing three potential limitations, including the confounding of the task demand effect, the regularity effects and the frequency effect. A possible way to settle the debate is to shift focus to the top–down role of neighborhood characteristics underlying the consistency effect in Chinese character recognition.

汉语语音一致性效应的研究始于1980年代。近四十年来，一致性影响及其对汉字识别的影响已被经常研究。本文提出了有关汉字识别一致性影响的争论。尽管一些研究支持基于一致性效应的存在而涉及词前语音学和亚词法处理，但其他研究则通过揭示三个潜在的局限性来反对这些说法，其中包括任务需求效应，规则性效应和频率效应的混杂。解决辩论的一种可能方法是将焦点转移到汉字识别的一致性效应基础上的邻域特征的自上而下的角色。