Visual Processing of Chinese Characters by Foreign Language Learners
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The constituent parts of compound Chinese characters provide crucial semantic and phonetic information for deciphering the character as a whole. Exploring sub-character level processing may help improve our understanding of the mechanisms of Chinese vocabulary storage and retrieval, especially in foreign language learners. Yet, empirical research on adult Chinese-as-a-foreign-language (CFL) learners in this area remains limited. Do CFL learners use decomposition strategies in visual character recognition? If so, how does the combination of familiarity with an individual character and character frequency contribute to this process? How do CFL learners and Chinese native speakers differ? To explore these questions, a masked priming character decision task was used. Results show that CFL learners do not decompose familiar high-frequency characters nor unfamiliar low-frequency characters. However, there was evidence of decomposition for unfamiliar high-frequency characters and familiar low-frequency characters. In comparison, native speakers were found to process compound characters holistically.
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Copyright © 2018 the author(s). Theses may be used for non-commercial research, educational, or related academic purposes only. Such uses include personal study, research, scholarship, and teaching. Theses may only be shared by linking to Carleton University Institutional Repository and no part may be used without proper attribution to the author. No part may be used for commercial purposes directly or indirectly via a for-profit platform; no adaptation or derivative works are permitted without consent from the copyright owner.
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- 2018
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xia-visualprocessingofchinesecharactersbyforeign.pdf | 2023-05-05 | Public | Download |