Phonetic awareness: Knowledge of orthography-phonology relationships in the character acquisition of Chinese children

This study investigated the development of phonetic awareness, meaning insi ght into the structure and function of the component of Chinese characters that gives a clue to pronunciation. Participants were 113 Chinese 2nd, 4th, and 6th graders enrolled in a working-class Beijing, China elementary scho ol. The children's task was to represent the pronunciation of 60 semantic p honetic compound characters. As anticipated, both character familiarity and character regularity strongly influenced performance. Children as young as 2nd graders are better able to represent the pronunciation of regular char acters than irregular characters or characters with bound phonetics. Phonet ic awareness continues to develop over the elementary school years, as is s hown by the increasing influence of phonetic regularity on the performance of children in higher grades and the increasing percentage of phonetic-rela ted errors among older children.