Psychonomic Bulletin & Review
2007, 14 (1), 64-69

Homophonic and semantic priming ofJapanese kanji words: A time course study
Hsin-Chin Chen and Takashi Yamauchi
Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas

Katsuo Tamaoka

Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, JapanandJyotsna Vaid

Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas
In an examination of the time course of activation of phonological and semantic information in processing kanji
script, two lexical decision experiments were conducted with native readers of Japanese. Kanji targets were preceded at short (85-msec) and long (150-msec) intervals by homophonic, semantically related, or unrelated primes
presented in kanji (Experiment 1) or by hiragana transcriptions of the kanji primes (Experiment 2). When primes
were in kanji, semantic relatedness facilitated kanji target recognition at both intervals but homophonic relatedness
did not. When primes were in hiragana, kanji target recognition was facilitated by homophonic relatedness at bothintervals and by semantic relatedness only at the longer interval. The absence of homophonic priming of kanji targets
by kanji primes challenges the universal phonology principle’s claim that phonology is central to accessing meaningfrom print. The stimuli used in the present study may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.

The role of phonology in how readers access meaningfrom print has been hotly debated. At issue is whether accessing the semantic representation of a word requires
prior activation of the word’s pronunciation, as the universal phonology principle claims (Perfetti, Zhang, & Berent,1992), or whether, as the dual route model of reading
comprehension claims, access to meaning proceeds via adominant direct orthographic route and a slower indirect
phonological route (see, e.g., Coltheart, 2000; Coltheart,
Rastle, Perry, Langdon, & Ziegler, 2001; Seidenberg,1985).1 Although substantial research has been conductedon this issue, much of it has involved readers of alphabetic
scripts (English, in particular), in which there is a close
correspondence between phonology and orthography,
making the relative contribution of the two components
hard to disentangle.
A better test of whether or not phonology is activated inword recognition prior to access to meaning is provided byreaders of logographic writing systems, such as Chinese,
since in these systems phonology and orthography do not
overlap and readers cannot use orthography-to-phonology
conversion rules. If activation of phonology were shown
to be a central component of word identification for logographic readers, the universal phonology principle would
have more force.
Several word recognition studies with Chinese readers have appeared in recent years. Perfetti and colleagues(e.g., Perfetti & Zhang, 1995) have argued that phonology
is automatically activated in logographic reading and isrequired for access to meaning. In one often cited study,
Perfetti and Tan (1998) reported an early homophonicpriming effect for Chinese, at a 57-msec stimulus onset
asynchrony (SOA). However, in this study (see also Tan &Perfetti, 1997) a naming task was used in which articulatory demands could well have contributed to the phonological effects observed. A similar interpretive problem
arises with the Stroop test used by Spinks, Liu, Perfetti,
and Tan (2000), in which phonological activation was also
observed. Indeed, studies with Chinese readers in which
phonological priming in a naming task was directly compared with that in a task that can be performed without
articulation, such as a lexical decision task, report priming
effects mainly for naming (Shen & Forster, 1999). Furthermore, even in studies of naming, evidence for phonological priming is not consistently obtained in logographic
readers. For example, Perfetti and Tan’s finding was not
replicated by other researchers (Chen & Shu, 2001; Wu& Chen, 2000; Wu & Chou, 2000). Thus, it would appear
that the evidence from Chinese readers to date does notprovide a clear test of the universal phonology principle.
Such a test would require a demonstration of phonological priming on a task that could arguably be performed
without phonological processing and a demonstration thatphonological priming precedes semantic priming. Both

H.-C. Chen, hc_chen@neo.tamu.edu

Copyright 2007 Psychonomic Society, Inc.

64

Word Recognition in Kanji     65of these elements were incorporated into the design ofthe present study, which was conducted with native readers of Japanese kanji (a logographic script derived from
Chinese). In this study, we used a primed lexical decision
paradigm with kanji targets to examine whether or not
homophonic priming occurs earlier than semantic priming of kanji. Before we turn to the study, consideration of
the relevant properties of kanji and of previous studies ofkanji processing may be useful.
Previous Studies of Word Recognition in Kanji
With respect to phonological and semantic processing, kanji is like Chinese but is also different in someways. Like Chinese, kanji characters are not phonemically decomposable; that is, components of a character
do not correspond to phonemes in the pronunciation of
the character. Whereas some compound kanji charactershave phonetic radicals that cue the pronunciation of thecharacter, the radicals themselves have their own meanings and pronunciations; thus, they are not really comparable to sublexical components in alphabetic scripts.
However, there are many more homophones in kanji thanin Chinese. Furthermore, a typical kanji character often
has more than one possible pronunciation: a Kun reading(of Japanese origin) and several On readings (of Chineseorigin). On readings are generally assigned to kanji wordsof two or more characters; the appropriate On reading isoften determined by the intraword context—that is, by
the other character with which a particular kanji character combines to form the word. Finally, whereas kanji
characters in Japanese text represent nouns and the rootsof verbs and adjectives, grammatical morphemes andfunction words are represented in a highly transparent,
syllabic writing system (hiragana). Neuropsychologicaland psycholinguistic studies suggest that kana and kanji
are organized and processed differently (see Shafiullah &Monsell, 1999; Shimamura, 1987).
Three kinds of word recognition studies with kanji bearon the issue of the role of phonology in access to meaning from print. Some authors have reported phonologicalconsistency effects with a naming task (Fushimi, Ijuin, Patterson, & Tatsumi, 1999; Wydell, 1998): Naming is faster
when the pronunciation of the phonemic radical in a kanji
character matches that of the whole character (Masuda &Saito, 2002). However, these studies leave open the questionof whether or not the phonological effects observed were
presemantic. Moreover, evidence for phonological effects
in naming simply shows that phonology can be activatedon a task that has articulation demands; it does not speak towhether or not phonology is typically activated even when
the task can be performed without articulation.
Two studies involving a semantic category judgmenttask with homophonic foils do speak to this issue. Wydell,Patterson, and Humphreys (1993) and Sakuma, Sasanuma,
Tatsumi, and Masaki (1998) reported that homophonicfoils of correct category members (e.g., meet following thecategory a type of food) interfered with category exemplar
judgments. However, the interference effect occurred only
when the homophonic foils were also orthographicallysimilar to their correct exemplars; furthermore, foils thatwere only orthographically similar also disrupted semantic
category judgments. These findings suggest that althoughphonology contributes to the activation of kanji meaning,its contribution is evident only under certain orthographic
conditions. In short, phonological similarity per se did notinterfere with kanji semantic category judgments.
In a third type of study of kanji recognition, same–­different judgments based on semantic versus phonological criteria have been examined for words presented atshort or long SOAs. Morita and Matsuda (2000) reported
that homophones interfered with synonym judgments
and that synonyms in turn interfered with judgments ofhomophony. Both kinds of interference were evident at
the shortest tested SOA (140 msec). However, homophonic interference was smaller than semantic interference,and fewer participants (11%) reported being aware of
the influence of homophony on semantic judgments thanvice versa (96%). Since homophonic and semantic interference both occurred by the shortest tested interval, one
does not know whether homophone activation would havepreceded semantic activation at a still earlier time point.
The Present Study
From the studies outlined above, we see that phonology may be activated when kanji is accessed under certain
conditions, but the strength and temporal onset of phonological activation relative to those of semantic activation
are unclear. To examine these issues, in the present study
we used a primed lexical decision paradigm. Targets were
two-character kanji words. Primes, presented at short (85msec) and long (150-msec) SOA intervals, were similar inmeaning or sound to the targets or were unrelated in bothrespects. The primes were presented either in the form of
two-character kanji (Experiment 1) or as hiragana homophones of the kanji primes (Experiment 2).
We hypothesized that if there is early, sustained activation of phonology in kanji word recognition, and if thiscontributes to meaning identification, then homophonicpriming of kanji targets should be found at a shorter SOA
than semantic priming whether the prime is presented inkanji (Experiment 1) or in hiragana (Experiment 2). Alternatively, if access to meaning for kanji words relies
primarily on a direct orthographic route, without phonological activation, then homophonic priming should not
be obtained for kanji lexical decision, whereas semantic
priming should occur at the shorter SOA with kanji primes(Experiment 1) and at a delay with hiragana transcriptionsof the kanji primes (Experiment 2).
EXPERIMENT 1
Lexical Decision Priming of
Kanji Targets by Kanji Primes
MethodParticipants. Twenty-four college students from Hiroshima University in Japan participated in the experiment. All were fluent readers of Japanese with normal or corrected-to-normal vision.
Design and Materials. The experimental design was a 2 (SOA:
85 vs. 150 msec) 3 3 (prime type: homophonic vs. semanticallyrelated vs. unrelated control) within-subjects factorial design.

66     Chen, Yamauchi, Tamaoka, and Vaid
In the present study, we applied the corpus produced by Amanoand Kondo (2000). This database was sampled from the Japanesenewspaper Asahi Shimbun from 1985 to 1998. The corpus contains
a total of 341,771 words having a total frequency of occurrence of
287,792,797. The main target stimuli consisted of 72 two-character
Japanese kanji words with an average frequency of 15.95 per million (Amano & Kondo, 2000) and an average of 18.54 strokes. Each, /tenji/, display) was paired with three
kanji target word (e.g.,, /tenji/,types of two-character kanji primes: homophonic (e.g.,
Braille), semantically related (e.g.,, /chinretsu/, display), and se, /ruro/, wandermantically and phonologically unrelated (e.g.,ing) to the target word. The three prime types were carefully matchedin number of strokes and mean frequency (see Table 1). Importantly,
the primes bore no systematic orthographic relation to the targets.
The same set of 72 main targets was presented to all the participants.
However, each of the six prime conditions (2 SOAs 3 3 prime types)
was paired with each main target across six groups of 4 participants
each, with any given participant seeing only one prime condition
for each main target. The stimuli may be downloaded from www.psychonomic.org/archive.
In addition, 24 filler kanji pairs with primes that were unrelated
to targets were intermixed with the experimental trials. Ninety, /futo/) were constituted by combining
six pseudowords (e.g.,
two existing kanji characters that are not normally paired with one
another. Each pseudoword target was also paired with a real two­character kanji prime.
Each participant received a different randomized sequence fromone of six counterbalanced lists (2 SOAs 3 3 prime types). Each list
consisted of 192 trials containing 72 main prime–target word pairs(i.e., 24 homophonic, 24 semantically related, and 24 unrelated control pairs), 24 filler word pairs, and 96 nonword pairs; half of eachtype of prime–target pairs were presented at the 85-msec SOA, andhalf were presented at the 150-msec SOA.
Procedure. The participants, tested individually, were first showna fixation stimulus (cross) for 1,000 msec, followed by a kanji prime
shown at the center of the screen at an SOA of either 85 or 150 msec.
Following the prime presentation, a kanji target appeared at the center of the screen until the participant’s speeded lexical decision response. Reaction time (RT) was recorded from the onset of target
presentation until the participant pressed a button. The participantsreceived 10 practice trials at the beginning of the experiment. A rest
was given after every 48 trials. The experiment was administered on
personal computers using the E-Prime software package (Schneider,
Eschman, & Zuccolotto, 2002).

Results and Discussion
All RT analyses were carried out with correct responses
only. For each participant and in each condition, trials with
RTs shorter than 200 msec or more than 2 SDs above themean were discarded. This procedure resulted in the rejection of 5% of the observations.2 Both subject-based(F1) and item-based (F2) two-way (SOA 3 prime type)
ANOVAs were conducted. Although our analyses focusedon the RT data with outliers removed, the accuracy data,

Table 1
Mean Number of Strokes and Mean Frequency
of Kanji Primes Used in Experiment 1
Prime Type
Semantic
Homophone
Control
Mean strokes
18.75
18.79
18.79
Mean frequency
12.53
12.44
12.52
Note—The frequency counts were based on Amano and Kondo’s (2000)
report of number of appearances per million words.

calculated from the entire set of trials, are also reported(see Table 2).
Overall, no homophone priming effect was observed,
but semantic priming occurred as indicated in the significant main effects of prime type for RT [F1(2,46) 5
4.40, p , .05; F2(2,142) 5 4.14, p , .05] and accuracy[F1(2,46) 5 3.55, p , .05; F2(2,142) 5 3.77, p , .05].
Furthermore, there was a main effect of SOA on RT[F1(l,23) 5 7.51, p , .01; F2(l,71) 5 6.45, p , .05] but
not on accuracy [F1(l,23) , 1; F2(l,71) 5 1.25, p 5 .27].
No interaction was found in either the RT or the accuracy
analysis (Fs , 1).
Our interest in the time course of the priming effects led
us to do further analyses,3 which showed that the semantic
priming effect was significant at the long SOA [for RT,
tDN1(92) 5 2.03, p , .05; tDN2(284) 5 1.82, p 5 .05; foraccuracy, tDN1(92) 5 1.90, p 5 .05; tDN2(284) 5 1.99,
p , .05] and marginally significant at the short SOA [forRT, tDN1(92) 5 1.87, p 5 .05; tDN2(284) 5 1.38, p 5.08; for accuracy, tDN1(92) 5 1.59, p 5 .07; tDN2(284) 5
1.66, p 5 .07]. For homophonic primes, however, thepriming effect was absent at both SOAs in all analyses(tDNs , 1), except for a marginally significant effect in
the accuracy data at the short SOA [tDN1(92) 5 1.59, p 5.07; tDN2(284) 5 1.66, p 5 .07].
Overall, our findings indicate that kanji lexical decision
was facilitated by semantic priming starting at the short
SOA tested (85 msec), whereas homophonic relatednessof kanji primes to targets did not facilitate kanji recognition at either SOA tested, suggesting that phonologicalactivation of kanji is weaker than semantic activation.
Is it possible that homophonic priming is absent in ourstudy because phonology was activated early but dissipated before 85 msec? If this were the case, one should
not find phonological priming in other studies with logographic readers at SOAs beyond 85 msec. However, studies with Chinese readers that have claimed that phonology
is activated report that phonology is sustained long enoughto produce priming at SOAs well beyond the 85 msec that
we used. For example, Perfetti and Tan (1998) reported
homophonic priming effects present at SOAs of up to
115 msec, Tan and Perfetti (1997) reported phonologically mediated semantic priming effects persisting up toa 243-msec SOA, and Perfetti and Zhang (1995) reported
phonological interference effects on a synonym judgmenttask at SOAs of up to 310 msec.
Although it appears unlikely that our failure to find homophonic priming effects at the 85-msec SOA was due toboth an early activation and an early dissipation of phonology, our second experiment addressed this possibility. In
Experiment 2, hiragana transcriptions of the homophonic,
semantic, and unrelated primes from Experiment 1 wereused as primes. Thus, exactly the same phonological information was presented as in Experiment 1 but in a scriptthat favors phonological processing (Forster & Yoshimura,
1994; Yamada, 1998). If phonology is indeed activatedearly but fades quickly, in Experiment 2 we should not
find the homophone priming that we found in Experiment 1. However, if there is early and sustained phonolog-

Word Recognition in Kanji     67Table 2
Mean Reaction Time (RT, in Milliseconds) and Accuracy (%) (WithStandard Errors) of Kanji Word Recognition As a Function of Kanji
Versus Hiragana Primes (Experiments 1 and 2, Respectively)
SOA
85 msec
RT
Prime Type150 msec
%

M

RT

SE

M

SE

M

SE

Semantic
HomophoneUnrelated

741
780
775

Kanji (Experiment 1)
16.0
92.7
1.8
726
20.4
92.7
2.0
753
20.2
89.2
1.8
762

22.6
22.2
23.9

94.8
92.7
90.6

2.1
1.8
1.5

Semantic
HomophoneUnrelated

800
706
793

Hiragana (Experiment 2)
35.3
90.6
1.5
771
19.5
95.5
1.3
701
27.4
90.3
2.1
798

25.6
24.2
28.6

93.8
94.1
89.6

1.4
1.8
2.0

ical activation induced by the transparency of the hiragana
script, hiragana homophone primes should facilitate thesubsequent lexical decision about kanji target words. The
relative unfamiliarity of the primes (due to their being hiragana transcriptions of words normally written in kanji)might slow their processing, but semantic priming wasstill expected, particularly at the longer SOA.
EXPERIMENT 2
Lexical Decision Priming of Kanji Targets
by Hiragana Primes
MethodParticipants. A new group of 24 college students from Hiroshima University participated in this experiment. All were fluent
readers of Japanese with normal or corrected-to-normal vision.
Design and Stimuli. The design and stimuli were identical tothose described for Experiment 1 except that all the primes were
presented in hiragana script.
Apparatus and Procedure. The apparatus and procedure in Experiment 2 were the same as in Experiment 1.

Results and Discussion
The same criteria and analyses as in Experiment 1 wereapplied to the present experiment. The cutoffs for extreme
RT scores led to the rejection of 5% of the observations(see note 2).
Overall, as was expected, phonological priming wasmore evident than semantic priming. A significant effectof prime type was found [for RT, F1(2,46) 5 16.88, p ,.001; F2(2,142) 5 8.24, p , .001; for accuracy, F1(2,46) 5
5.68, p , .01; F2(2,142) 5 4.81, p , .05]. There was noeffect of SOA (Fs , 1) for any of the analyses, nor were
there any significant interactions between prime typeand SOA [all Fs , 1.48, p . .24]. Further analyses revealed that at the 85-msec SOA, the homophonic priming effect was significant in the subject-based RT analysis[tDN1(92) 5 4.21, p , .001] and marginally significant in
the item-based RT analysis [tDN2(284) 5 1.77, p 5 .06]
[for accuracy, tDN1(92) 5 2.57, p , .05; tDN2(284) 5
2.44, p , .05]. At the 150-msec SOA, the homophonicpriming effect was also significant [for RT, tDN1(92) 5

SE

%

M

4.75, p , .001; tDN2(284) 5 2.79, p , .01; for accuracy,tDN1(92) 5 2.23, p , .05; tDN2(284) 5 2.11, p , .05].
Furthermore, as we expected, there was no semantic
priming effect at the 85-msec SOA in either the RT or
the accuracy analysis (tDNs , 1). The semantic priming
effect was marginally significant for RT at the 150-msec
SOA [tDN1(92) 5 1.31, p 5 .09; tDN2(284) 5 1.47, p 5.08] and was significant for accuracy [tDN1(92) 5 2.06,
p , .05, tDN2(284) 5 1.95, p , .05].
Our results show that kanji targets can benefit from homophonic hiragana primes at SOAs as short as 85 msec.
With respect to semantic priming, our results showed thathiragana primes weakly facilitated kanji target recognitionand did so only at the longer SOA.
General Discussion
In this study, we sought to test the universal phonology principle, according to which access to meaning fromprint requires the activation of phonological information,even in readers of logographic scripts. Unlike some previous studies with Chinese readers (e.g., Perfetti & Tan,
1998) in which the argument was made that, once derived,
phonology is sustained long enough to produce priming at
intervals beyond those used in the present study, we foundno evidence for homophonic priming of kanji lexical decision from kanji primes. The lack of a homophonic priming
effect leads us to conclude that phonology is not central
for kanji processing. Instead, our results showed fast androbust semantic priming of kanji targets by kanji primes.
We believe that our study provided a better test of theclaim that phonology is central and activated prior tomeaning in word recognition than previous attempts, andthat our failure to find support for the claim thus presentsa challenge to the universal phonology view. Furthermore,
our results accord with findings from time course studiesof phonological and semantic priming in Chinese readers (Chen & Shu, 2001; Wu & Chen, 2000; Wu & Chou,
2000) that failed to replicate the early homophonic priming effect reported by Perfetti and Tan (1998) even whenusing the same stimuli as in the latter study (see Chen

68     Chen, Yamauchi, Tamaoka, and Vaid
& Shu, 2001). These studies instead report that semantic priming occurred consistently and much earlier thanphonological priming in Chinese readers. Taken together,
these results support the notion that readers of logographic
scripts rely on a direct orthographic route when accessing
meaning from print.
In our second experiment, in which hiragana primes
were presented with kanji targets (Experiment 2), we
found early and robust phonological priming and weakerand delayed semantic priming. This diverging pattern ofpriming as a function of prime script type was directly
confirmed in an analysis in which the data were pooled
across experiments. When experiment was included as afactor, there was a significant prime type 3 experiment interaction in RT [F1(2,92) 5 15.30, p , .001; F2(2,142) 5
10.23, p , .001]. If phonology does not play a major rolein kanji processing, how may one interpret the nature ofthis phonological effect in Experiment 2, in which the targets were also written in kanji?
As transcriptions of kanji primes, our hiragana primes
were somewhat novel stimuli, and it is not immediately
obvious how they might be processed. From other studies
with hiragana, we know that hiragana words are processed
differently from kanji words in terms of phonological activation (e.g., Forster & Yoshimura, 1994). Since the hiragana primes in our study were actually derived from kanji
words and thus did not have a familiar lexical entry in the
hiragana orthographic lexicon, their phonology must havebeen generated through a nonlexical (assembly) route.
Once generated, this phonological information could havefacilitated activation of the stored pronunciation of the
kanji target word in the kanji phonological lexicon and,from there, the semantic representation of the kanji targets could have been accessed.4 As Coltheart (personalcommunication, January 12, 2006) noted, this pathway
is comparable to that which an English reader would use
to decide if the pseudohomophone kote sounds like thename of a type of garment. At short SOAs, there should be
sufficient time to activate the phonology of the hiragana
primes and retrieve the stored pronunciation of the kanji
target postlexically, but not enough time to get to the semantic representation. This account could explain why, in
our Experiment 2, homophone priming was observed as
early as the 85-msec SOA but semantic priming emerged
only at the longer SOA.
In a sense, the hiragana transcriptions in our Experiment 2 also served as a kind of repetition prime (a possibility suggested to us by Steve Lupker). As in cross-modal
repetition priming, in which the phonology of an auditory
stimulus facilitates processing of its visual counterpart,presenting kanji primes in hiragana transcription may havefacilitated homophonic processing of the kanji targets.
Whatever the means by which the hiragana primes activated the phonology of the kanji targets, our results showthat kanji phonology could not efficiently be recruited tohelp the processing of semantic information of the kanji
words. If phonology is indeed useful in accessing semantic
information, as the universal phonology principle claims,
how could phonology be strongly activated from 85 msec
onward but still have difficulty reaching the meaning of its

kanji target? The answer would seem to be that phonological activation is not central in kanji processing.
author noteA preliminary report of this research was presented at the annual
meeting of the American Psychological Society, Los Angeles, 2005.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to H.-C.
Chen, Department of Psychology, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843-4235 (e-mail: hc_chen@neo.tamu.edu).
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Notes
1. The dual route model for accessing meaning from print (termed
DR-M by Coltheart, 2000) is to be distinguished from the dual route
model for generating phonology from print (termed DR-P; Coltheart,2000). The latter consists of a lexical mechanism that retrieves a stored
phonological representation of a word directly through a lexical entry
and an assembly mechanism that assembles the output of grapheme tophoneme conversion rules.
2. We also conducted the same analyses with different cutoff points(e.g., 2.5 SD, 1,500 msec). The basic results with these cutoff points
were analogous to those described in the two experiments.
3. The analyses of comparisons within the simple main effects followed Kirk (1995, pp. 134–137, 282–286, 454–472).

4. As one reviewer suggested, some of our homophonic primes inExperiment 2 may have had more than one meaning. A semantic priming
effect could have been diluted by this semantic ambiguity. To test for thispossibility, we analyzed RT scores by stimulus ambiguity, comparing
responses to ambiguous items (n 5 35) to responses to nonambiguous
items (n 5 37), but found no effect of ambiguity [F(1,70) , 1] and nointeraction with any of the other variables (all ps . .1).
Archived Materials
The following materials associated with this article may be accessed
through the Psychonomic Society’s Norms, Stimuli, and Data archive,
www.psychonomic.org/archive.
To access these files, search the archive for this article using the journal (Psychonomic Bulletin & Review), the first author’s name (Chen),
and the publication year (2007).
File: Chen-PBR-2007.zip
Description: The compressed archive file contains three files:
Chen-PBR-InPress.xls, containing stimuli, strokes, and frequencies
used in Chen, Yamauchi, Tamaoka, and Vaid (2007) as a 30K Excel
worksheet generated by Excel 2000 for PC.
Chen-PBR-2007.txt, containing the same materials as above, as a 6K
tab-delimited text file generated by Excel 2000 for PC.
Chen-PBR-2007.pdf, containing the same materials as above, as a
360K pdf file generated by Adobe Acrobat 5.0 for PC. This file can beread using Adobe Reader without installing special Asian fonts.
Author’s e-mail address: hc_chen@neo.tamu.edu.
Author’s Web site: http://people.tamu.edu/~hc_chen.

(Manuscript received February 27, 2005;
revision accepted for publication June 8, 2006.)