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Reading and Writing

, Volume 30, Issue 6, pp 1251–1265 | Cite as

Radical sensitivity is the key to understanding Chinese character acquisition in children

  • Xiuhong Tong
  • Xiuli Tong
  • Catherine McBride
Article
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Abstract

This study investigated Chinese children’s development of sensitivity to positional (orthographic), phonological, and semantic cues of radicals in encoding novel Chinese characters. A newly designed picture-novel character mapping task, along with nonverbal reasoning ability, vocabulary, and Chinese character recognition were administered to 198 kindergartners, 172 second graders and 165 fifth graders. Children’s strategies in using positional, phonological, and semantic cues of radicals varied across grades. The higher the children’s grade level, the more commonly children used semantic and positional cues of radicals. Regression analyses showed that the contribution of semantic radical awareness for explaining Chinese character reading increased as children’s grade increased, whereas the contribution of positional regularity awareness decreased. These findings suggest that learning Chinese characters involves a transition from a sound- and position-based approach to a meaning-based approach.

Keywords

Radical awareness Word reading development Sublexical units Semantic radical Phonetic radical Semantic–phonetic compound character 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

This study was presented at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading and it was awarded by the Scientific Studies of Reading Society as L. Sandak Young Investigator Award. We thank the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading. It was also supported in part by Collaborative Research Fund of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region Research Grants Council (CUHK8/CRF/13G) to Catherine McBride. We are also very grateful to schools, parents, and children for their participation.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Institute of Psychological Sciences, Zhejiang Key Laboratory for Research in Assessment of Cognitive Impairments, and Center for Cognition and Brain DisordersHangzhou Normal UniversityHangzhouChina
  2. 2.Speech and Hearing Science Department, Educational FacultyUniversity of Hong KongShatinHong Kong
  3. 3.Psychology DepartmentThe Chinese University of Hong KongShatinHong Kong

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