The Investigation Of Learning Pictophonetic Character For Foreign Students

This paper includes two experiments. The foreign students attend both of the two experiments. The paper investigated whether the processes of acquisition for phonetic and semantic radicals of Chinese characters are different between different native language system learners at different Chinese levels.Experiments one uses the semantic categorizations task to investigate foreign students'lexical access of ideogram characters with different familiarities, whose native languages and Chinese level are different. We want to know weather there is interactive affection between the radical element concept and the character using frequency, and the different time process between different language backgrounds. The results showed that semantic clues play more and more important role for recognizing the characters for both the familiar and the unfamiliar characters'lexical access with the student's Chinese level improving. There are no much more differences for the processes of acquisition of semantic radicals between the different language background students. The reasons might be of the differences between the learners themselves, the study environment for the second language acquisition, and the learning strategy.Experiments two uses the identity judgment task to investigate foreign students'pronunciation of phonogram characters with different familiarities, whose native languages and Chinese levels are different. We want to know weather there is interactive affection between the phonetic element concept and the character using frequency, and the different time process between different language backgrounds. The result showed that regular effect plays a more and more important role with the students'Chinese level improving. The phonetic element clue plays the role for both familiar and unfamiliar characters. The process of awareness of phonetic element is different between the different language backgrounds: the students from Japan and Korea develop the awareness of phonetic element earlier than the students do from euro and USA, while the process is slower.In a word, there is not much more different to develop the awareness of meaning radicals while there is different to develop the awareness of phonetic element for different language background students. We should use different methods in teaching pictophonetic characters according to cognitive characteristics of different level students with different backgrounds.