Routes to learning Chinese characters : strategies used by Japanese and Korean Chinese as foreign language learners

Abstract

This study investigates the strategies used in novel character processing among 44 Chinese as foreign language (CFL) learners with either Japanese or Korean as their first language. The CFL learners completed a picture mapping task under three conditions: no cue, phonetic cue (pronunciation of the character) and semantic cue (description related to the character) provided conditions. Their strategies to map picture with pseudo-characters are analyzed. Positional strategy is found to be the dominant strategy in both Japanese and Korean learners. Japanese learners use more semantic strategy than Korean learners under semantic cued condition while correct pronunciation of the character positively predicts the use of phonetic strategy and positional strategy in Korean learners but not Japanese learners. The result supports that there is language transfer when learning a foreign language and the transfer is governed by orthographic distance.