Abstract
The present study investigated the development of Chinese preschool children’s awareness of semantic radicals in Chinese characters. The two specific areas of focus were the development of awareness of the category consistency of the semantic radical and awareness of the semantic radical. A sample of 55 four-year-old children and 61 five-year-old children were randomly selected from a public preschool that did not include formal literacy education in its curriculum. Experiment 1 found that the children’s awareness of the category consistency of semantic radicals had not yet developed, regardless of the configuration of characters. Experiment 2 found that the children showed no obvious awareness of the semantic radical and had a strong bias toward using phonetic radicals rather than semantic radicals to classify characters, with the bias being significant for characters of left-right configuration. The current findings suggest that Chinese preschool children have an awareness of radicals in Chinese characters and they are more sensitive to the phonetic radical than to the semantic radical and, consequently, prioritize the former.
Highlights
Emergent Literacy theory emphasizes that preschool children develop literacy by learning words naturally in their daily living environments and through parent-child reading activities before receiving formal literacy education (Whitehurst and Lonigan, 1998; Sénéchal et al, 2001)
Chi-square tests, done for the categorical data, showed that, overall, there was no significant difference between the percentage of choices depending on the category consistency and category inconsistency of the semantic radical among different age groups, χ2 (1) 0.67, p > 0.05
Binomial test on categorical data of all subjects found that for characters of left-right configuration, there was no significant difference between the percentage of choices depending on the category consistency (52.16%) and category inconsistency (47.84%) of the semantic radical, p > 0.05; and for characters of top-bottom configuration, there was no significant difference between the percentage of choices depending on category consistency (47.95%) and category inconsistency (52.05%) of the semantic radical, p > 0.05
Summary
Emergent Literacy theory emphasizes that preschool children develop literacy by learning words naturally in their daily living environments and through parent-child reading activities before receiving formal literacy education (Whitehurst and Lonigan, 1998; Sénéchal et al, 2001). An important component of literacy, is closely related to preschool children’s ability to decode words in the future (Whitehurst and Lonigan, 1998). Preschool children generally acquire preliminary print knowledge with age (Goodman, 1986). The Print Experience Model suggests that even in the case of informal literacy education, preschool children can acquire print knowledge through natural contact with words (Justice & Lankford, 2002). Print knowledge in Chinese refers to the basic word awareness of children who speak Chinese as a native language, which includes the visual form of Chinese characters and Chinese orthographic awareness; a high-level print knowledge (Liu et al, 2014)
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