Chinese Phonetic Component

A few studies have found that children after several years of experience with Chinese characters indeed become more aware of the function of the phonetic components.

Regular characters refer to those characters that are pronounced exactly in the same way as the phonetic component on its own. For example, the character 油[yóu] is regular since it has the same pronunciation as 由[yóu]. In contrast to this, the character 抽[chōu] is irregular since its pronunciation is different from that of the phonetic component 由[yóu]. This regularity effect was found to be greater on unfamiliar characters than on familiar ones. Perhaps, on familiar characters, the children could right away recall the sounds of the characters without having to figure them out from the phonetic components. Children could name phonologically regular characters more accurately than irregular ones, especially for low-frequency characters. These studies show that children have developed an insight into the relation between the sounds of the phonetic components and those of the characters. This is referred to as the part-whole relation between the components and the characters in this dissertation.

Development of the awareness of phonetic component. the performance of Second Graders was more likely to be determined by their familiarity with the characters rather than the regularity. This means that children in junior grade levels are more likely to learn the characters by rote. But in senior grade levels, greater proportion of phonetic error (i.e., mispronouncing the irregular character 琼([qióng], rare jade) as the sound of the phonetic component 京[jīng]) and analogy error (i.e., mispronouncing the character 秕([bǐ], empty rice husk) as the other high-frequency character 批[pī] that contains the same phonetic component 比[bǐ]) was found. These errors reflect the children’s attempt to use the information of the phonetic components to pronounce the characters. In other words, young children tend to learn by rote whereas older children investigate the phonetic components of the characters. Shu et al. suggest that the Fourth Graders appeared to be in transition.

In Beijing school, in Grade One, only 48% of the characters taught are semantic-phonetic characters, and only 29% of them have regular pronunciations. The proportion of semantic-phonetic characters then increases over the first four grade levels and then levels off at 86%, and in Grade Four, about 45% of them are regular. most of the characters that children encounter in junior grade levels either do not have a phonetic component or are pronounced different from the phonetic components. Thus, the children in junior grade levels have only limited opportunity to be exposed to the regularity between the sounds of the characters and those of the phonetic components. This may be the reason why children must develop such an insight into the phonetic components in around Grade Four.

Awareness of phonetic component and learning Chinese phonetic symbols. In addition, learning Chinese phonetic symbols is helpful to developing the awareness of phonetic component.

Consistency of the characters. Like regularity, an alternative approach to look at children’s knowledge of phonetic component is by means of manipulating the consistency of the characters. By consistent is meant that most of the neighboring characters that share the same phonetic component are pronounced in the same way as the character. For example, there are a total of twelve characters that contain the component 由[yóu]. Five out of them, i.e., 由, 油, 鈾, 釉 and 柚, are pronounced as [yóu], while only two, i.e., 迪 and 笛, are pronounced as [dí]. In this sense, the five characters with the pronunciation of [yóu] are said to be more consistent than the two of [dí].

This concept of consistency is in some cases more useful than the previous concept of regularity, which looks at whether the sound of a character matches that of its phonetic component. This is because the sounds of some phonetic components such as 枼[yè] as in the characters 葉[yè] and 碟[dié] have become rarely known to most people. However, quite likely, children make use of the pronunciation of one of the two characters to pronounce the other. In this case, the concept of regularity has failed to capture the similarity in the sounds of the two characters, which is however clearly reflected in the concept of consistency.

The recognition of the function of phonetic components in the characters appears to be important to the learning of Chinese characters. However, this apparent importance is not supported by the statistics of the linguistic analysis on modern Chinese characters. According to Zhou (周有光), the proportion of Chinese characters in which the phonetic component is an effective cue to the their sounds is only 39%. In other words, using the phonetic component to determine the sound of the characters may not be effective. As compared to the phonetic components, children may instead be more sensitive to the function of semantic components.