Chinese Character Phonological Awareness

   It has been well established in the field of learning alphabetic languages like English that phonological skills of children are highly correlated with their ability to read.

For example, good readers perform well in phonological tasks such as identifying words that rhyme with each other like “cat” [kæt] and “mat” [met]. Bryant and Bradley reports that the performance of young school children on rhyme and alliteration tasks was significantly correlated with their reading ages, and successfully predicted the subsequent success or failure of pre-school children in learning to read. In other words, good readers do not regard the various spoken sounds of their language as unrelated to each other. Rather, they are aware of the common features in the speech sounds, i.e., the structure in phonology.

  Children with serious reading problems could easily learn to read English represented by Chinese characters. For example, the children were taught to read “父買黑車[fù mǎi hēi chē]” as “Father buys black car” (i.e., each character was read as an English word). Although these children had difficulty in mapping the letters to the sounds in their learning of English, they could in this program map the Chinese characters to the speech at the level of words. This suggests that understanding the grapheme-phoneme correspondence (GPC) rule plays a very important role in the learning of the spellings of words. Phonological awareness in Chinese. How is it about children’s phonological awareness of Chinese language? similar in learning to read Chinese characters. Most Chinese characters are semantic-phonetic characters, which consist of a semantic component and a phonetic component. Rhyme detection of Chinese characters (e.g., choosing the odd sound out of three spoken syllables[fā], [mā] and[bō]) was found to correlate with the reading aloud of semantic-phonetic characters. In line with this, word recognition was highly correlated with phonological skills in tone and rhyme discrimination tasks. In the study on Chinese children in Taiwan, before First Graders had received any formal instruction in reading Chinese characters, early phonological performance was found to significantly correlate to their reading ability at the end of the first year.

  Learning Chinese phonetic symbols has been repeatedly found to be able to improve phonological awareness. compared two groups of Chinese literate adults, who had, and had not, learned 漢語拼音[Hanyu Pinyin][used in Mainland China] before. It was found that phonological skill did not develop spontaneously even with many years of schooling and everyday reading and writing experience. a significant increase in phonological skills was achieved immediately after First Graders had learned the 注音符號[Zhu-Yin-Fu-Hao][used in Taiwan]. Both studies point to the fact that phonological skill is only developed because of learning a Chinese phonetic script.

  The nature of children’s phonological awareness is dependent upon the phonological structure specific to their language. This means that phonological awareness developed in one language cannot be easily transferred to another language. Despite having learned Zhu-Yin-Fu-Hao, the Taiwanese children found the task of phoneme deletion with English (e.g., deleting the /s/ from “stop”) virtually impossible. Also, Hong Kong children were significantly better than UK children on first sound deletion from words with an initial consonant cluster. the reason for this to the fact that English children may treat initial consonant clusters (e.g., the “br” in “bread”) as single units, and when European words with consonant clusters are represented in Chinese, which has no consonant blends, the clusters are typically broken up so that each consonant has its own syllable, for example, the “Cl” in “Clinton” into “克林頓”[kè lín dùn]. This suggests that phonological skills are dependent upon one’s specific experience of their own language.

  Phonological awareness seems to play a more important role in learning English words than in learning Chinese characters. Chinese characters are composed in a way very different from that of English words. one important characteristic of Chinese characters is that most of the characters are made up of a semantic component and a phonetic component. The semantic component provides the clue to the semantic field to which the character belongs (e.g., the 木([mù], tree) in the character 榕([róng], banyan)) while the phonetic component provides the clue to the sound (e.g., the 容[róng] in 榕[róng]). It was found in many studies that those children who are aware of these semantic and phonetic components can learn the characters better. In what follows, I shall present a review of these studies.