Evaluating the Critical Period Influence on the Development of Semantic Radicals Awareness and Lexical Tones Awareness in Chinese Character Recognition

Abstract

The present study adopts the priming word-judging paradigm to investigate whether the critical period will influence radical and lexical tone awareness during the bilinguals' Chinese character recognition. Two types of bilinguals (simultaneous and sequential bilinguals) will be recruited as participants in the present study. The different features between these two types of participants are used to test the influence of the critical period. Through a Chinese character decision task experiment, we hypothesis that the critical period will influence the semantic radical and lexical tone awareness while processing the Chinese characters of bilinguals. In addition, this study will provide some advice to learning Chinese characters in second language acquisition.