Acta Psychologica Sinica

Abstract

Phonetic radicals in Chinese characters can provide cues for the pronunciation of whole characters. These cues can be consistent, making all the characters containing a particular radical to be pronounced in the same way. They can also be inconsistent, allowing characters containing the same radical to be pronounced in different ways. This study investigated school children’s awareness of orthographic structure and the use of phonological cues of phonetic radicals. Subjects were asked to judge whether two characters having the same phonetic radical were homophones. In each pair, the first character was a familiar character while the second one was a new character. In guessing the pronunciation of the second character and making judgment, children had to be aware of the orthographic structure of the familiar and new characters and use their knowledge about he phonological value of the phonetic radical. It was found that children’s judgment was influenced by the consistency of phonetic radicals in providing phonological cues to the whole characters. Pairs containing consistent radicals were less likely to be judged as non-homophones than pairs containing inconsistent radicals. This effect was more pronounced as children were getting older.

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