Chinese Semantic Radicals 1 Running head: CHINESE SEMANTIC RADICALS Learning Vocabulary in Chinese as a Foreign Language: Effects of Explicit Instruction and Semantic Cue Reliability

Does providing reliable semantic information help second language learners acquire new words? Two experiments investigated whether adult learners of Chinese benefited from explicit instruction of semantic information when learning new characters. We manipulated whether semantic subcomponents were reliable cues to word meanings and whether the semantic information was taught explicitly or implicitly. We found a main effect of cue reliability, with better learning for characters with related semantic radicals, and an advantage of explicit instruction for long-term retention. Our results suggest that learners can benefit from being taught the connection between semantic subcomponents of characters and the meanings of words, and they can apply this knowledge when learning new vocabulary items. Chinese Semantic Radicals 3 Learning Vocabulary in Chinese as a Second Language: Effects of Explicit Instruction and Semantic Cue Reliability Adult learners of a second language generally benefit more from explicit instruction than implicit instruction (e.g., de Graaff, 1997; Ellis, 1994; Ellis, 2005; Norris & Ortega, 2000; Ullman, 2001). When learning complex grammar structures in a foreign language, adults benefit more from being explicitly told the grammatical rule than from having to infer a rule through implicit exposure to many exemplars (Reber, 1989; Reber, Kassin, Lewis, & Cantor, 1980). But most aspects of reading and language seem to have exceptions to the rules. For example, in English, sound-spelling correspondences are highly variable. In Spanish, gender markings of determiners do not always match the final vowel of the noun. In Chinese, certain characters have different pronunciations and meanings depending on the sentence context. When there are irregularities or exceptions such as these, would explicit instruction of rules still be beneficial to the learner? Many words in Chinese have semantic radicals, or orthographic subcomponents that provide information about the meanings of the characters. Previous research has shown that learners of Chinese as a foreign language do not detect the presence of helpful cues in the orthographic forms unless such relationships are taught explicitly (e.g., Taft & Chung, 1999; Zhang, in preparation). In one study, native speakers of Australian English, who had no knowledge of Chinese languages, were presented with 24 Chinese character-meaning pairs to learn. Participants who were told about semantic radicals early in their training remembered more items on an immediate post-test than those who were provided the information late in training or not at all (Taft & Chung, 1999). In another study, native speakers of American English who were learning Chinese as a second language studied Chinese noun classifiers while Chinese Semantic Radicals 4 receiving different types of explicit feedback. Results showed that learners benefited most from having attention drawn to the relationships between form and meaning (i.e., focus on form), even if it was via minimal hints (Zhang, in preparation). These results suggest that if a learner of Chinese as a second language is explicitly taught how to use relevant cues, especially early in their curriculum, it should benefit vocabulary acquisition. However, explicit instruction might not always be superior for all aspects of language learning. Studies of complex grammatical systems have shown that, when instructed to memorize items (implicit learning condition), participants learned underlying grammatical structures better than those who were instructed to figure out the rule (explicit learning condition). Essentially, the people in the explicit learning condition spent cognitive effort trying to determine the underlying pattern, and often came up with incorrect guesses (Reber, 1989; Reber, Kassin, Lewis, & Cantor, 1980). So, once a misconception is in place, it will lead to future errors in learning. It is not clear, yet, whether explicit or implicit instruction would be better for teaching the meanings of Chinese characters. On the one hand, students can benefit from being explicitly taught the nature of the writing system, with focus on location and reliability of semantic and phonetic components. On the other hand, students might become distracted or overwhelmed by all the exceptions or irregularities inherent in the writing system. Semantic cues in Chinese are not always reliable predictors of word meaning (Hanley, 2005; Shu, Chen, Anderson, Wu, & Xuan, 2003), it may actually be more confusing for a beginning learner to be taught inconsistent form-meaning relationships. The aim of this study was to determine how reliability of cues can affect vocabulary learning in a new language. The written form of Chinese contains a high percentage of Chinese Semantic Radicals 5 compound characters, which are single, one-syllable words made up of semantic and phonetic components. 1 These radicals often provide clues to the character’s meaning and pronunciation. However, a reader cannot rely solely on using these components to decode new words in Chinese. Therefore, we wanted to ascertain whether it was helpful to teach the sometimes ambiguous relationship between sublexical forms and whole word meanings. In two experiments, adult learners of introductory Chinese as a second language studied the form, pronunciation, and meaning of new Chinese compound characters. In order to determine if providing semantic cues helped learners acquire new vocabulary items, we varied whether the semantic radicals were reliable or unreliable cues to character meaning, and whether their relationship was taught explicitly or not. We predicted main effects of reliability and explicitness, such that learners learns items with related semantic radicals better than items with unrelated semantic radicals, and that students would perform better on items studied in the explicit condition compared to the implicit condition. Experiment 1 Method