Transparent semantic radicals facilitate orthographic learning in Chinese

Purpose: According to the self-teaching hypothesis (Share, 1995), word-specific orthographic representations are acquired via phonological decoding. Whether a similar orthographic learning mechanism exists in Chinese is intriguing due to the more direct orthography-semantic mapping and less consistent orthography-phonology correspondence in Chinese. The current study aims to examine whether semantic transparency and phonological regularity of radicals, recurrent patterns of strokes, affect orthographic learning of Chinese children.

Method: Thirty-two second graders in Mainland China read aloud 12 short texts annotated with pinyin, a phonetic script in Chinese. Each text described a novel object represented by a pseudo-character, a novel combination of a semantic radical and a phonetic radical in their legal positions. One third of phonetic radicals were regular, semi-regular, or irregular, which provide full, partial, or misleading information about the character pronunciation, respectively. Half semantic radicals were transparent (semantically related to the object) and half were opaque (semantically unrelated to the object). Children were asked to recognize and write the target character immediately after they read each short text and three days later.

Results: Students performed significantly better on the transparent items than on the opaque items in both character recognition and writing tasks. No performance difference was found among regular, semi-regular, and irregular characters. The patterns were consistent for both the immediate and delayed tests.

Conclusions: The findings reveal a unique role of semantic transparency in the acquisition of word-specific orthographic representations in Chinese. The absence of phonetic regularity effect may be due to the redundant phonological cues of pinyin. Copyright © 2016 Society for the Scientific Study of Reading (SSSR).