Chinese characters: Semantic and phonetic regularity norms for China, Singapore, and Taiwan

Liow, Susan J. Rickard; Tng, Siok Keng; Lee, Cher Leng

doi:10.3758/bf03207706

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…These features contrast with spoken English and Bahasa Malaysia, so the phonological and morphological development of the Chinese-LB children is different from that of the other two groups (see Hua, 2002, for details). In kindergarten, a small number of simplified compound Chinese characters are taught, but the ability to derive clues to the meaning or sound from their constituent semantic and phonetic radicals depends on a substantial sight vocabulary (Rickard Liow, Tng, & Lee, 1999). Therefore, the Chinese-LB children's home language neither promotes morphological awareness nor sensitizes them to regularities in orthography–phonology relationships 1…”

Section: Bilingualism and Home Languages In Singaporementioning

confidence: 99%

The development of bilingual children's early spelling in English.

Liow¹,

Lau²

2006

Journal of Educational Psychology

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By using an extended version of R. Treiman, M. Cassar, and A. Zukowski's (1994) flaps spelling task (wa_er, is it t or d in water?), the authors investigated the metalinguistic awareness of 6-year-old bilingual children from 3 different language backgrounds (LBs): English-LB (English-L1, Mandarin-L2), Chinese-LB (Mandarin-L1, English L2), and Malay-LB (Bahasa Malaysia-L1, English-L2). Treiman et al. found that unilingual English-speaking children's performance was poorer on flapped words than on control words and better on /d/ flaps than on /t/ flaps, suggesting phonology is salient even for beginners. The data for bilinguals revealed predictable group differences in the use of orthographic and phonological awareness for early spellings, even though the children were all attending the same English-medium kindergarten. Possible educational implications for linguistic minority children are briefly discussed.

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Section: Bilingualism and Home Languages In Singaporementioning

confidence: 99%

The development of bilingual children's early spelling in English.

Liow¹,

Lau²

2006

Journal of Educational Psychology

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“…This information, together with other information that is available about Chinese characters (Hao et al, 2008;Liu et al, 2007;Rickard Liow et al, 1999;Shu et al, 2003), can help researchers to choose stimuli and to design methodologically sound studies. Moreover, our finding that the overall iconicity of simplestructure Chinese characters is fairly low supports the idea (DeFrancis, 1989;Hall, 1986;Perfetti & Dunlap, 2008) that Chinese is not as pictorial as is popularly thought.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Normative data for these and other characteristics have been collected, often on the basis of judgments by native speakers of Chinese, and these data have been published in several reports (Hao, Shu, Xing, & Li, 2008;Liu, Shu, & Li, 2007;Rickard Liow, Tng, & Lee, 1999;Shu et al, 2003). These databases are useful to the many researchers studying Chinese, but they do not include information about the degree to which characters look like their referents.…”

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confidence: 99%

Iconicity of simple Chinese characters

Xiao

Treiman

2012

Behav Res

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The iconicity of a Chinese character, or the degree to which it looks like the concept that it represents, has been suggested as affecting the learning and processing of the character. However, previous studies have not provided good empirical information on the iconicity of specific characters. To fill this gap, 40 U.S. adults with no knowledge of Chinese were given an English word or short phrase together with two Chinese characters and were asked which character matched the meaning of the English word. The right and wrong answers had the same number of strokes, and different wrong answers were used for different participants. We examined all 213 simple-structure Chinese characters that occur in textbooks for elementary school children. The overall percentage of correct responses was 53.6%, slightly but significantly higher than would be expected by chance. Using a false discovery rate procedure, we found that 15 of the 213 characters were guessed at a level higher than chance. The proportion of correct responses to each character, which can be taken as an indicator of its degree of iconicity, should be useful to researchers studying Chinese character reading and writing. The full database, showing the proportion of correct guesses and other psycholinguistic variables for each character, can be downloaded from http://brm.psychonomic-journals.org/content/supplemental.

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Computer-Assisted Learning for Chinese Based on Character Families

Lee

Yeung

2020

Information Management and Big Data

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Chinese characters: Semantic and phonetic regularity norms for China, Singapore, and Taiwan

Cited by 6 publications

References 33 publications

The development of bilingual children's early spelling in English.

The development of bilingual children's early spelling in English.

Iconicity of simple Chinese characters

Computer-Assisted Learning for Chinese Based on Character Families

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