The Development of Preschool Children’s Awareness of Semantic Radicals in Chinese Characters

Abstract

The present study investigated the development of Chinese preschool children’s awareness of semantic radicals in Chinese characters. The two specific areas of focus were the development of awareness of the category consistency of the semantic radical and awareness of the semantic radical. A sample of 55 four-year-old children and 61 five-year-old children were randomly selected from a public preschool that did not include formal literacy education in its curriculum. Experiment 1 found that the children’s awareness of the category consistency of semantic radicals had not yet developed, regardless of the configuration of characters. Experiment 2 found that the children showed no obvious awareness of the semantic radical and had a strong bias toward using phonetic radicals rather than semantic radicals to classify characters, with the bias being significant for characters of left-right configuration. The current findings suggest that Chinese preschool children have an awareness of radicals in Chinese characters and they are more sensitive to the phonetic radical than to the semantic radical and, consequently, prioritize the former.