| Summary: | 碩士 === 臺北市立教育大學 === 華語文教學碩士學位學程 === 100 === The present study investigated preferential use of sublexical cues in decoding new Chinese characters among learners of Chinese as a second language (CSL), whose first language employs an alphabetic writing system. A pseudocharacter choice task was administered to 21 adult CSL learners, in which they had to choose from three pseudocharacters the one that best represented an invented object with a novel name. Each pseudocharacter was composed of a semantic radical and a phonetic radical. In two pseudocharacters, one radical conveyed relevant information and the other irrelevant. In the third, both radicals were irrelevant. Results showed that the participants rarely chose pseudocharacters with irrelevant radicals, indicating that they had knowledge about functions of phonetic and semantic radicals in Chinese characters. There was indication that their preferential use of sublexical cues in decoding was affected by the order of presentation in the pseudocharacter choice task. At the first three or four items of the pseudocharacter choice task, a greater number of CSL learners relied on phonetic radicals in decoding new Chinese characters. They chose more characters comprising relevant phonetic but irrelevant semantic radicals than characters comprising relevant semantic but irrelevant phonetic radicals. In the last two or three items, they shifted to rely on semantic radicals, choosing more characters with relevant semantic but irrelevant phonetic radicals. These results indicate that the CSL learners have developed an inventory of working hypotheses in interpreting new characters and that their preference for sublexical cues are flexible and adaptive in attuning to the nature of the task. Finally, the participants’ preference for phonetic or semantic radicals in decoding is not related to their Chinese character reading ability or the length of Chinese learning, indicating that as CSL learners acquire basic Chinese reading skills, they rapidly become aware of the sublexical cues in interpreting Chinese characters and use the cues flexibly and adaptively.
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