Use of Partial Information in Learning to Read Chinese Characters

This study investigated whether children can use partial information to learn the pronunciations of Chinese characters. Participants were 49 2nd graders and 56 4th graders whose home language was Mandarin and 75 2nd graders and 93 4th graders whose home language was Cantonese. Children had 2 trials...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of educational psychology 2003-03, Vol.95 (1), p.52-57
Main Authors: Anderson, Richard C, Li, Wenling, Ku, Yu-Min, Shu, Hua, Wu, Ningning
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Biological and medical sciences
Children
China
Chinese
Chinese languages
Educational psychology
Elementary Education
Elementary school students
Foreign Countries
Foreign language learning
Fundamental and applied biological sciences. Psychology
Human
Ideography
Language Development
Learning
Phonetics
Pronunciation
Psychology. Psychoanalysis. Psychiatry
Psychology. Psychophysiology
Pupil and student. Academic achievement and failure
Reading Ability
Reading Development
Written Language
Citations: Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:This study investigated whether children can use partial information to learn the pronunciations of Chinese characters. Participants were 49 2nd graders and 56 4th graders whose home language was Mandarin and 75 2nd graders and 93 4th graders whose home language was Cantonese. Children had 2 trials to learn the Mandarin pronunciations of 28 unfamiliar compound characters of 4 types. Children learned to pronounce more regular characters, which contain full information about pronunciation, and more tone-different and onset-different characters, which contain partial information about pronunciation, than characters with unknown phonetic components, which contain no information about pronunciation. Mandarin-speaking children learned more pronunciations than Cantonese-speaking children.
ISSN:0022-0663
1939-2176
DOI:10.1037/0022-0663.95.1.52