The Implicit and Explicit Learning of Orthographic Structure and Function of a New Writing System

Abstract

Two experiments were carried out to examine how adult readers of English learn to acquire the orthographic structure and function of Chinese characters selected from reading material in their first-semester college course in Chinese. The first experiment, an online lexical decision task, demonstrated that the learners quickly acquired knowledge about the orthographic structure of the characters. With only limited vocabulary and without explicit instruction, they were sensitive to the characters' curriculum frequency and internal compositional features. Overall, these results were consistent with our previous findings (Wang, Perfetti, & Liu, 2003). The second experiment further tested the learners' implicit and explicit learning of the orthographic component function of Chinese characters. In an offline unknown character identification task, these learners showed difficulty in making use of the functional cue of the known semantic radical without any probing. However, with probing they identified visually the majority of target semantic radicals. In addition, they demonstrated implicit knowledge of the meaning cue of the semantic radical by making more appropriate meaning inferences on high-frequency radicals than on low-frequency ones. After receiving explicit instruction, the students extracted significantly more meaning information from known semantic radicals, particularly low-frequency ones, compared to their performance prior to such instruction.