CHILDRENS UNDERSTANDING OF THE FORMAL AND FUNCTIONAL-CHARACTERISTICS OF WRITTEN CHINESE

Chinese script is often viewed as an exception to the processes of lan guage learning in that it is presumed to be learned by rote. However, recent psycholinguistic investigations describing the formal and funct ional constraints of Chinese script have offered a new direction for a cognitive analysis of its acquisition. We investigated children's und erstanding of the formal and functional aspects of written Chinese in a task of judgment of orthographic acceptability and a creative spelli ng task. The formal constraint we examined was the fixed position of s troke patterns and their function as either a semantic radical (giving a clue to meaning) or a phonological component (giving a clue to pron unciation). The children (aged 4 to 9) attended either kindergarten or primary school in Hong Kong. Our results indicated that 6-year-olds c ould already use the positional rule to reject nonwords (which violate the formal constraint of position) as unacceptable, whereas pseudowor ds (which do not violate this constraint) were judged as acceptable. S ignificant effects of age and orthographic acceptability were observed . The task of creative writing replicated this trend and showed that, from age 6, the children were able to use semantic radicals to represe nt meaning. However, a more systematic use of phonological components as a clue to pronunciation was observed only among 9-year-olds. We con clude that learning to read and write in Chinese is not simply accompl ished by the rote memorization of individual characters: rather, as ch ildren progress in learning, they develop an understanding of the unde rlying rules of written Chinese.