Semantic–Phonological Cue Weighting in L2 Chinese Learners’ Character Processing

Description

This study explores how L2 Chinese learners’ first-language writing systems influence their reliance on radical-level cues, particularly semantic and phonetic radicals and their conventional spatial arrangement. Two groups of learners were compared: Korean participants, whose writing experience is primarily sound-based but located within a historically Sinospheric context, and Japanese participants, who frequently encounter Chinese characters as meaning-bearing units in daily reading. Using a picture–pseudo-character ranking task, the study tested whether learners rely on radical-level cues to infer character meaning and sound. The results indicate that both groups are sensitive to the conventional
spatial arrangement of the semantic and phonetic radicals and can extract both semantic and phonological information from radicals, but they differ in how these sources are weighted. Japanese learners show stronger reliance on semantic components, whereas Korean learners more often integrate semantic and phonetic information in a balanced way. These findings suggest that L2 character processing is guided not only by available visual information at the radical level, but also by L1-driven expectations about how information is typically structured inside Chinese characters, with direct implications for character instruction design.

Period	11 Jun 2026 → 12 Jun 2026
Held at	Department of Chinese Language and Literature, University of Macau, Macao, China
Degree of Recognition	Regional