Chinese children's use of orthographic information and analogy process in learning to read Chinese

The first focus of this study was to identify whether Chinese children's character recognition relies on rule-like information in Chinese character structure. Second, the study was to investigate whether children use the strategy of orthographic analogy to read new characters, whether character knowledge and phonological knowledge contribute to the use of orthographic analogy. The major results are summarized in the followings.In the matching-to-sample shape task, it was found that children in first and third grades chose the phonetic component to match shape similarity more often than the other two types of information, radical or overall similarity. Third graders showed more radical responses than overall similarity responses, but first graders did not demonstrate this difference. Also, third graders chose the phonetic component to match shape regardless of different character conditions.The phonetic component response was still used most often in the matching sound and meaning tasks by first and third graders. However, by comparing the results across the three tasks, it showed that first graders chose the phonetic component consistently across the three different tasks. But third graders chose more phonetic responses in both shape and sound tasks than in the meaning task. Third graders had a slightly higher percentage of radical response in the meaning task, however, the preference did not reach the statistical significance.In the analogy task, children in both grades chose the phonetic component in making analogy for pronunciation more often than the radical or overall similarity, regardless of character conditions. Character knowledge and sound deletion ability were better predictors in accounting the variance for the use of phonetic component in the third grade. However, no specific variable was strong enough to predict the use of the phonetic component in the first grade.U of I OnlyETDs are only available to UIUC Users without author permissio