Acta Psychologica Sinica

Abstract

Phonetic awareness has been reported to be important in acquisition of Chinese characters. Using a learning-testing task, which is almost the same as the task as teacher uses in the classroom, the present study examined the role of partial information a phonetic provided for pronunciation of character in learning and memorizing new characters. The basic method is, in a serials of experiments, children are asked to learn and memorize three types of characters: (1) Characters in which the phonetic provides full information (onset, rime and tone) for pronunciation of the whole character, that is regular character. (2) Characters in which the phonetic provides partial information for pronunciation of the whole character, like tone-different character (onset and rime) and onset-different character (rime). (3) Characters in which the phonetic provides no information for pronunciation of the whole character, like phonetic-unknown character. The results showed: (a) Characters in which the phonetic provides full information were better learned than characters in which the phonetic provides partial information, and characters in which the phonetic provides partial information were learned better than characters in which the phonetic provides no information. (b) Children got higher score on tone-different semi-regular characters than onset-different characters. All these suggested that children can make use of partial information and they are sensitive to different degrees of partial information. So partial information is helpful for children in learning and memorizing new Chinese characters.

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