Chinese Readers’ Knowledge of Orthographic Structure of Chinese Characters: Study from a View of Statistical Approach of Language Learning
Date Issued
2011
Date
2011
Author(s)
Lo, Ming
Abstract
Learning of Chinese characters is described in terms of learning and regularization of a statistical structure underlying linguistic inputs (Shaffran, 2003; Wonnacott & Newport, 2005). The majority of Chinese characters are LR-characters, in which a character consists of two components that are arraged to form a left-and-right structure. For instance, the character ‘棋’ /qi2 / is composed of the components ‘木’ /mu4/ and ‘其’ /qi2/, and another character ‘期’ /qi2/ consists of the components ‘其’ /qi2/ and ‘月’ /yue4/. Although the component that hints the pronunciation of a LR-character can be the right or the left component of the character, the phonetic component is frequently the right component of a LR-character. If, after learning an amount of characters, a Chinese reader tends to regularize the position of a phonetic component of a LR-character to develop a rule that ‘其’ should be the right part of a LR-character, then ‘棋’ is the one that follows the rule while ‘期’ is the one that violates the rule, and the two types of characters should be treated differently by the reader. To investigate the relationship between the number of characters a reader has learned and the the way that a reader develops rules of the position of phonetic components, a group of college and elementary school students was invited to participate in the present research. In addition, to investigate what is the effect of the rules on the cognitive processing of a LR-character, the participants were asked to read a number of real characters or pseudo-characters. In Exp. 1 and 2, ten college students and twelve first-graders were asked to sub-vocalize pseudo-characters. Event-related potentials were measured, and greater P200 amplitudes were elicited in the condition that the left component of a pseudo-character was a phonetic component. However, the effect was not found for the first-graders. In the third and the fourth experiments, 27 college students and 24 fifth-graders were asked to sub-vocalize regular and irregular characters. Event-related potentials were also measured, and for both groups of the participants, greater P200 amplitudes were elicited when the character is regular and the left component of the character was a phonetic component. In Exp. 5 and 6, twenty college students and thirty sixth-graders were asked to read aloud regular and irregular characters. The regularity effect in Chinese (Hue, 1992; Lee, Tsai, Su, Tzeng, & Hung, 2005) was replicated, and reaction times lengthened in the condition that the left component of a regular character was a phonetic component. The pattern of the results indicates that the joint probability between the structure of characters and the position of a phonetic component is acquired and regularized by readers to form an abstract rule of orthographic structure of LR-characters. And Chinese young readers are able to form the abstract rule of orthographic structure of LR-characters when they are in fifth grade.
Subjects
statistical learning
reading
Chinese character learning
event-related potentials
visual word recognition
Type
thesis
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