Meta-linguistic Awareness of Chinese Characters

Meta-linguistic knowledge of the characters can be roughly categorized into four types, which are phonological awareness, awareness of phonetic component, awareness of semantic component and orthographic awareness.

Respectively they concern the structure of speech sounds, the relation between phonetic components and the sounds of characters, the relation between semantic components and the meanings of characters, and the structure of orthographic or written forms.

Orthographic Awareness

Early development of orthographic skills. Children’s orthographic skills of the characters evolve through developmental levels as they are exposed to more characters.

The children learned that each character is written within an imaginary square with a regular constricted size across all of characters. The size of the components of a character needs to be readjusted in order to fit into the square. For example, the same component 口([kǒu], mouth) appears differently in writing the character 唱([chàng], sing)  and the character 口([kǒu], mouth)  on its own. In the study, the children’s writing of the components proceeded from scribbles to strokes. Circles and whirls disappeared and were replaced by strokes and dots, which are distinctive characteristics of the Chinese characters.

Older children used more strokes and then more stroke-patterns (i.e., called “components” in this dissertation) in their writing. But they still had to write the characters within the squares. As the children became more mature, they gained mastery of these orthographic features of Chinese characters.

Legal position of components. In psychological experiments to test the kindergarten and primary school children’s knowledge about the legal position of the components in the characters, i.e., whether they know that component always appears on the left-hand side of a character. It was found that 6-year-old children could correctly reject as unacceptable characters non-words with components placed in illegal positions, such as. Moreover, the children tended to mistakenly accept more pseudo-characters such as with components correctly placed in their legal positions even though there were no such characters in Chinese. Another paradigm for studying the legal position of components is to ask children to combine components to form novel pseudo-characters. Common semantic and phonetic components were printed on transparencies. The task of the children was to put the semantic and phonetic components together as invented pseudo-characters representing certain novel characters. It was found that from about age 6, roughly in Grade One, the children began to place the semantic and phonetic components according to the legal positions. the young children gradually became sensitive to the legal positions of components in the characters.

Configuration of the characters. One important orthographic feature of the characters is about the configuration of the characters. Typical configuration of components of a character includes: horizontal  such as 怕([pà], fear) and 材([cái], material), vertical  such as 呈([chéng] to present to superior) and 忠([zhōng], loyal), and enclosed  such as 困([kùn], to be surrounded) and 固([gù], solid). undergraduate students in Taiwan were asked to sort various characters by their visual similarity in shape. The participants were found to categorize the various characters by their configurations but not by the common components that the characters shared. In other words, those characters with the same configuration such as 怕([pà], fear) and 材([cái], material) tended to cluster together according to the participants’ judgments of similarity, whereas characters that shared the same components were separated from each other. both Taiwan and Japanese undergraduates who were skilled Chinese or kanji readers classified characters according to the configurations. But American, Taiwanese illiterate adults and kindergartners, who had never learned Chinese characters, categorized the characters based on common components, for example, 閒[xián] and腳[jiǎo], both of which share the component 月([yuè], meat). This means that the unskilled Chinese readers considered characters having the same component as similar.

Children learning Chinese characters do not simply memorize the form, the sound and the meaning of each character by rote. Rather, more able children have also gained an insight into the general features of all characters. They know that the sounds of the characters are not totally distinct from each other but rather sharing similar properties, such as in rhyme. Children also realize the relation between the components and the characters, i.e., semantic components provide a clue to the meanings of the characters while phonetic components provide a clue to the sounds. Children have also gained orthographic knowledge about the way that the characters should be composed, for example, some components can only appear at a certain position in the characters. Being aware of these general features of the characters should be helpful to the learning of other new characters in the future.