The Time Course Of Graphic, Phonological And Semantic Information Processing In High Frequency Chinese Character Recognition For Foreign Students

Through changing four types of SOA(stimulus onset asynchrony) and four different priming types,using priming-category judgment task which is based on phonological information,the time course of graphic,phonological,semantic information activation was examined in the recognition of Chinese high frequency characters by beginning and advanced foreign students whose mother language is alphabetic language.In order to explore the way of recognizing Chinese characters by foreign students whose mother language is alphabetic.The results show that the level of Chinese character influences the time course of graphic, phonological,semantic information activation of high frequency Chinese character.For the beginning learners,phonological information is activated firstly,phonological information is activated secondly,but the graphic information is not activated.For the advanced learners, graphic information and semantic information are activated at almost the same time,but the phonological information is not activated.This suggests that the phonological strategy is the predominant strategy,the second strategy is semantic strategy for the beginning learners. Whereas the semantic strategy and graphic strategy are the predominant ones adopted by the advanced learners.This study has important pedagogical implication for teaching Chinese as a second language. It is suggested that TCFL teachers should highlight the grapheme learning of Chinese character for the beginning learners,to strengthen the connection between the phoneme and semanteme of Chinese characters.