Orthographic learning via self-teaching in Chinese: The roles of phonological recoding, context, and phonetic and semantic radicals

Struggling with L2 alphabet: The role of proficiency in orthographic learning

The present study examined the process of L2 orthographic learning in bilinguals with distant L1-L2 orthographies. Chinese-English bilinguals with various English proficiency levels were trained with novel L2 words during a reading task. In contrast to higher proficient learners, those with lower L2 proficiency exhibited increased effects of length, frequency, and lexicality across exposures and at-chance recognition of trained words. Importantly, an additional post-training task assessing the lexical integration of trained words evidenced the engagement in different L1-L2 reading strategies across different levels of L2 proficiency, hence suggesting the L1 holistic processing at the base of the effortful establishment of L2 orthographic representations shown by lower-proficient learners. Overall, these findings indicate the role of L2 proficiency in the influence that cross-linguistic variation exerts on L2 orthographic learning and highlight the need for English education programmes to tackle specific grapheme-to-phoneme skills in non-alphabetic target communities.

Learning to read Chinese: the roles of phonological awareness, paired-associate learning, and phonetic radical awareness

This study aimed to determine how Chinese children adapt to Chinese orthography-phonology correspondence by acquiring phonetic radical awareness (PRA). This study used two important Chinese encoding approaches (rote and orthographic approaches) as the developmental trajectory, in which the present study hypothesized that phonological awareness (PA) exerts not only a direct influence on PRA but also an indirect influence through paired- associate learning (PAL). We also explored whether the association between PA and PAL is affected by the complexity of visual stimuli embedded in PAL. This study recruited 70 s-grade students to participate in various tests, which assessed (a) PA (measured by onset and rhyme awareness), (b) PRA (measured by regularity and consistency of phonetic radicals), (c) PAL (measured by learning performance on strokes; pattern-object and strokes pattern-syllable mapping), and (d) Chinese character recognition ability. Path analyses indicated that (1) character size had a significant positive correlation with PRA but not with PAL, (2) PAL fully mediated the association between PA and PRA, and (3) compared with PAL with a low stroke count, PA had a stronger relationship with PAL with a high stroke count. The results of this study were consistent with previous studies and suggest that PRA is the most important literacy skill for children in the middle of their learning-to-read stage. The results also augment existing literature by revealing that PRA acquisition is increased by PAL supported by PA, rather than by PA alone. Moreover, when the visual complexity of PAL increases, the support of PA to PAL would increase to make up for the working memory shortage.