This study, employing unmasked priming lexical decision tasks, examines the possible effects of the phonogram properties on the representation of Chinese phonograms and their radicals. In Experiment 1, the representation of radicals (semantic radical and phonetic radical) and their host phonograms is compared under various phonograms types.…

A 3-year longitudinal study among 239 Chinese students in Grades 2-4 was conducted to investigate the relationships between orthographic skills (including positional and functional knowledge of semantic radicals and phonetic radicals, and orthographic memory of radicals) and Chinese literacy skills (word reading, word spelling, reading…

Radicals are building blocks of Chinese complex characters and exhibit certain positional, phonological and semantic regularities. This study investigated whether adult non-native learners of Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) were aware of the positional (orthographic), phonological and semantic information of radicals, and whether such…

Most sinograms (i.e., Chinese characters) are phonograms (phonetic compounds). A phonogram is composed of a semantic radical and a phonetic radical, with the former usually implying the meaning of the phonogram, and the latter providing cues to its pronunciation. This study focused on the sub-lexical processing of semantic radicals which are…

This study examines the effects of semantic and phonetic radicals on Chinese character decoding by high-intermediate level Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) learners. The results of the study suggest that the CFL learners tested have a well-developed semantic pathway to recognition; however, their phonological pathway is not yet a reliable means…

The effects of semantic and phonetic radicals on Chinese character decoding were examined. Our results suggest that semantic and phonetic radicals are each available for access when a corresponding task emphasizes one or the other kind of radical. But in a more neutral lexical recognition task, the semantic radical is more informative. Semantic…