In Chinese orthography, a dominant character structure exists in which a semantic radical appears on the left and a phonetic radical on the right (SP characters); a minority opposite arrangement also exists (PS characters). As the number of phonetic radical types is much greater than semantic radical types, in SP characters the information is…

This dissertation 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 main study (discussed in Chapter #5) suggest that the CFL learners tested have a well-developed semantic pathway to recognition; however, their…

The complexity of Chinese orthography has hindered the progress of research in Chinese to the same level of sophistication of that in alphabetic languages such as English. Also, there has been no publicly available resource concerning the decomposition of Chinese characters, which is essential in any attempt to model the cognitive processes of…