ROLE OF RADICAL AWARENESS IN THE CHARACTER AND WORD ACQUISITION OF CHINESE CHILDREN

A TOTAL of 292 Chinese children in the first, third, or fifth grade pa rticipated in one of two experiments investigating radical awareness; that is, the insight that a component of Chinese characters, called th e radical, usually provides information about the character's meaning. The technique used in the experiments was to present two-character wo rds familiar from oral language but which the children had not seen be fore in print. One of the characters was written in Pinyin, the alphab etic system that Chinese children learn in the first 2 months of first grade. The children's task was to select a character to replace the P inyin. The first experiment showed that third graders and fifth grader s were able to select characters containing the correct radicals even when the characters as a whole were unfamiliar to them, which must mea n that they were aware of the relationship between a radical and the m eaning of a character. The second experiment showed that children were better able to use radicals to derive the meanings of new characters when the radicals were familiar and the conceptual difficulty of the w ords was low. Children rated as good readers by their teachers display ed more awareness of radicals than children rated as poor readers.