Chinese Children's Use of Subcharacter Information About Pronunciation.

Two experiments involving Chinese 2nd graders and 4th graders investigated the use of subcharacter information to learn to pronounce unfamiliar semantic-phonetic compound characters. Experiment 1 confirmed that children can use the information in both tone-different and onset-different characters to learn character pronunciations and showed that phonological awareness generally facilitates learning. Experiment 2 demonstrated that children can utilize the information in bound-phonetic characters as well as, or even better than, the information in independent-phonetic characters, which implies that Chinese children can use an analogy strategy for decoding compound characters.