The role of phonological and orthographic processing on Chinese character recognition for proficient Chinese learners

Abstract

 This paper aims to investigate the predictors of Chinese reading and the role of phonological and orthographic processing on Chinese character recognition for secondary school students in Mainland China. Forty teenage students around 16 years old from Guangdong, Mainland China were invited to participate in this study. A series of tests on phonological and orthographic skills and reading ability were conducted on the subjects to examine the relationship between phonological and orthographic awareness and Chinese reading. The statistic results indicated that reading ability was correlated with phonological awareness on the onset-rime level. Orthographic awareness was not important in Chinese character reading for secondary high school students. The results of the hierarchical regression showed that only the onset awareness was an effective predictor for Chinese reading. A proofreading task is designed to explore the phonological and orthographic processing in character recognition. Participants are required to circle out the incorrect characters substituted by different types of incorrect or identical characters. Repeated measures ANOVA were used to analyze the pairwise comparison within the proofreading task. Both phonological and orthographic interference had significant effects on character recognition. This suggested that both orthographic and phonological processing was involved in Chinese character recognition for secondary school students. Phonological processing was activated as an essential constituency of character recognition rather than an optional mediation processing.