Chinese, a non-alphabetic language, is composed of characters made up of strokes and radicals. Unlike English, there are no grapheme-phoneme rules in Chinese. However, there are some orthographic-phonological rules related to the phonetic radical which could give some degree of phonological information to the character. Chinese characters are used in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. The type of character used and the instruction methods are different in these places. China uses simplified characters while Hong Kong and Taiwan use traditional characters. Children in China and Taiwan learn to use a phonetic system before learning characters while Hong Kong children learn by rote. How do the three groups differ in their phonological and orthographic processes? Twenty-five adult participants from each place were compared on a series of phonological and orthographic tasks. The phonological tasks included reading aloud real and pseudo-characters. The orthographic tasks included radical-completion tasks and a lexical decision task. It was found that the three groups shared the same central processing patterns and their differences could be explained by the different types of characters used and the absence or presence of a phonetic script. Two important characteristics of the component radical were identified: its type frequency and its sequence effects. The type frequency suggested the influence of its neighbours and the sequence effect suggested a writing sequence influence. Prelim~nary modifications to the existing lnteractiveactivation framework and the Interactive Constituency Model were attempted to illustrate how the component radicals might be represented in the mental lexicon. Theoretical implications and further research were discussed in the domain of developmental studies with both normal and disordered populations.