The Knowledge of a Chinese Reader Concerning how Chinese Orthography Represents Phonology

A phonetically aware Chinese reader is able to infer the pronunciation of an unknown character from its constituent components; especially the one occupies the right half of the character. According to the statistical model of language learning, such a position strategy is really a bias representation of how Chinese characters representing phonology. This research tested the two positions by collecting the way subjects pronounced two types of pseudocharacters, one with a high validity phonetic on the right and the other on the left. Although the results supported the statistical model, it also showed that the position strategy was a dominant heuristic subjects relied on to guess the pronunciations of unknown characters. Introduction A Chinese character is composed of line strokes, and thus does not carry the kind of grapheme-phoneme correspondence an alphabetic word usually possesses. It had been shown that because the Chinese orthography is not designed to represent phonology, without proper training of Chinese phonemes, a Chinese reader could not develop phonemic awareness (Cheung & Chen, 2004; Read, Zhang, Nie, & Ding, 1986). However, Shu, Anderson and Wu (2000) showed that a reader of simplified characters is able to develop the so called “phonetic awareness” as s/he learns to read increasing numbers of characters, and similar finding was also reported for readers of traditional characters (Hue, 2003). Similar to a person with phonemic awareness, Shu et al. (2000) argued that a child who is phonetically aware has “ ...the insight into the principles that govern orthographyphonology relationships in Chinese ...”, and is able to form hypotheses to guide “...perceptual processing, strategies for learning and retrieving the pronunciations of characters, and ... to forecast the pronunciations of unfamiliar characters....(p. 57)” They pointed out that the majority of the frequently used character are phonograms which are composed of two components, a phonetic located at the right half of a character and a radical located at the left (upper panel of Fig. 1). As a result, a phonetically aware reader is able to develop a position strategy to guess the pronunciation of an unknown character. S/he will use its right component to guess the character’s pronunciation if the component is a pronounceable character itself. In the case that the component is not a pronounceable character, the reader will infer the pronunciation of the unknown character from its neighbors which also contain the component. Figure 1: Two two-component characters, one with its right component as the phonetic and one with its left component as the phonetic. Although Hsiao and Shillcock (2005) did not provide the statistics concerning how the various parts of a Chinese character representing phonology, they mentioned that the position of a phonetic is not fixed in a Chinese character, whether or not the character is a two-component phonogram (lower panel of Fig. 1). To test Hsiao and Shillcock’s argument, the characters contained in the frequency norms prepared by the Chinese Knowledge Information Processing