ABSTRACT

In this study, we investigated if children build a print-to-meaning connection via the semantic radical – a mechanism we call semantic decoding – and its interaction with phonological decoding in orthographic learning of Chinese compound characters. Ninety-two Grade 4 children were taught the pronunciations and meanings of 16 pseudocharacters and were then exposed to their written forms in short stories. Half of the characters contained semantic radicals related to the taught meaning; the other half were unrelated. Half of the children learned the pseudocharacters’ regular pronunciations; the other half learned the irregular pronunciations. There was better orthographic learning of regular than irregular pseudocharacters across measures of spelling and orthographic choice. However, the effect of semantic decoding was not as unequivocal. The findings indicate that in Chinese, decoding via phonetic radicals underpins orthographic learning. Whereas, the effect of semantic decoding might depend more on the linguistic features of the radicals and the learning environments.

摘要

在这项研究中，我们调查了儿童是否通过语义部首建立了印刷到意义的联系——我们称之为语义解码的机制– 及其与汉字拼写学习中语音解码的相互作用。92 名四年级儿童学习了 16 个假字符的发音和含义，然后在短篇小说中接触到他们的书面形式。一半的汉字包含与教义相关的语义部首；另一半是无关的。一半的孩子学会了伪字符的常规发音；另一半学习了不规则的发音。在拼写和拼写选择的测量中，规则伪字符的拼写学习比不规则伪字符更好。然而，语义解码的效果并不那么明确。研究结果表明，在汉语中，通过语音部首解码是拼写学习的基础。然而，