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

Abstract

This study investigated the development of phonetic awareness, meaning insight 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 school. The children's task was to represent the pronunciation of 60 semantic phonetic 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 characters than irregular characters or characters with bound phonetics. Phonetic awareness continues to develop over the elementary school years, as is shown by the increasing influence of phonetic regularity on the performance of children in higher grades and the increasing percentage of phonetic-related errors among older children.

Cites (1)

1. The organization and activation of orthographic knowledge in reading aloud.
   Glushko, Robert J. · 1979 · Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance

Show all 1 references

Cited by (2)

1. On the anglocentricities of current reading research and practice: The perils of overreliance on an “outlier” orthography.
   Share, David L. · 2008 · Psychological Bulletin
2. Acquisition of Literacy in Bilingual Children: A Framework for Research
   Bialystok, Ellen · 2007 · Language Learning

See all 185