An Empirical Study on Chinese Character Processing by Alphabetic, Japanese, and Korean Learners

Considerable studies have concentrated on Chinese character processing by Chinese native speakers. In contrast, relatively few studies have been on L2 Chinese learners from different native language backgrounds and at different Chinese proficiency levels. The present study investigated character processing by alphabetic, Japanese, and Korean learners at intermediate and advanced Chinese proficiency levels to fill the gap. Three elicitation tasks adapted from previous studies (Ma et al., 2016; Tong et al., 2016; Zhang & Wang, 2010), namely the semantic categorization task, the pronunciation judgement task, and the picture-pseudo character matching task, were employed to specifically examine the roles of orthography, phonology, and semantics in Chinese character processing by the learners. The semantic categorization task and pronunciation judgement task used the priming paradigm and shared the same prime-target Chinese characters as the experiment materials. The test trials consisted of five groups of prime-target characters, 15 pairs in each group. The grouping was based on the relationship between the prime and target characters, including: (1) orthographically similar (e.g., “饭—板”) ...