Developmental Stages in Learning to Read Chinese Characters

91 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004.The results of the dissertation support a three-stage model in learning to read Chinese. Preschoolers who just begin learning to read are in the first, visual stage. They remember the first words by relying on a few distinctive features. As early as kindergarten, children begin using phonological information. The ability to use the phonetic strategy and the analogy strategy develops simultaneously and improves as reading experience increases. By the second grade or even sometime earlier, children are in the phonetic stage in which they can use both phonological strategies reasonably well. Somewhere between second and fourth grade, children enter the orthographic stage, which is characterized by the use of consistency information contained in families of characters.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD