From radicals to characters : the role of positional, phonetic, and semantic cues in children's novel character learning

Abstract

This study sought to examine the nature of the relation between radicals and characters by testing children’s strategy used in coding novel characters. The semantic, phonetic and positional information were manipulated in a picture-mapping test. A total of 94 Chinese children: 32 first-graders, 32 third-graders and 30 fourth-graders from Hong Kong mainstream primary schools were invited to complete this test under three different conditions: (1) when no cue was provided, (2) when the phonetic cue was provided, and (3) when the semantic cue was provided. The results showed that children at all grades predominantly used positional strategy (structural knowledge) when no cue was provided. On the other hand, when cues were provided, children increased the use of phonetic and semantic strategies (functional knowledge). The findings suggested that there is a tendency of using holistic processing more under implicit conditions and analytical processing more under explicit conditions. To conclude, positional cues play a larger role than semantic and phonetic cues in Children’s novel character learning due to early development of the structural knowledge and high stability of the positional cue.