Exploring the role of radicals in novel characters learning among Chinese as foreign language learners

Abstract

This study investigated the role of radicals in novel character processing among 93 Chinese as foreign language (CFL) learners. The CFL learners represented 28 languages spoken nowadays completed a picture-mapping task with three conditions: no cue, phonetic cue and semantic cue provided conditions. They could use semantic, phonetic and positional strategies to learn novel characters while positional strategy was dominating across conditions. Semantic radical was found to be a unique predictor of Chinese character recognition. The study supports that Chinese processing mechanism underlying character learning is uniquely shaped by the language features and would not be affected by native languages and Chinese proficiency. This implies that Chinese character learning would not be challenging if one understands the language features thoroughly.