Phonetic Awareness: The Knowledge of a Chinese Reader Concerning How Chinese Orthography Represents Phonology

Many researches confirmed that Chinese readers know Chinese orthography-phonology correspondences. Shu, Anderson and Wu (2000) called this kind of knowledge phonetic awareness. However, they didn’t discuss about how a Chinese reader decides which component is the phonetic. Therefore, the present study tries to investigate Chinese readers’ knowledge of how Chinese orthography represents phonology from the perspective of statistical learning. In Experiment 1, we found that the phonetic appears in the right position more than the left position in all the corpuses we used. It was also revealed that the probabilities of the phonetic in the right position increased across the different volumes of Chinese text books. In Experiment 2, we found that Chinese readers used right components to guess the pronunciations of pseudo-characters whose right components were the phonetics, and the tendency was more apparent as the age and vocabulary size of the readers increased. On the other hand, they showed no tendency to refer to the left or right component when the phonetic was in the left position. We concluded that Chinese readers know not only the Chinese OPC rules, but also know that the phonetics often appear in the right position of a character.