An Experimental Study On Naming The Tones Of Pictophonetic Characters By Foreign Students

Using a naming task, this study was carried out to investigate Chinese characters' tones offoreign students, whose mother tongue was tone language or non-tone language. The materialswere sixty-four pictophonetic characters. The subjects who had studied Chinese for above threeyears were asked to judge a character's tone is one, two, three or four. The results showed thatthere was a "frequency effect" in the processing of pictophonetic characters' tones. The naminglatencies of high-frequency characters were shorter and the correct rates of them were higherthan middle-frequency ones. And there was also a "tone relation effect" in processingpictophonetic characters' tones, that is, the correct rates were high if the phonetic radicals and thewhole characters had the same tones. And there were no obvious differences between the twogroups of students whose mother tongue was tone language or non-tone language.