Effects of different types of Chinese characters on the ability of character recognition for Chinese children

This study examined how different categories of Chinese characters and their phonetic components affected character learning and character recognition. Participants were 3655 Chinese students from grades 1 through 9. Results indicated that there was a statistically significant relationship between grade and accuracy of character recognition at the elementary level, but not in junior high, and that some categories were significantly more difficult to recognize than others. The category that was the most difficult to recognize was the one in which there was a phonetic component embedded in the character. When this category was further broken into five subtypes, there were significant differences in recognition accuracy among these subtypes. To summarize, ease of learning individual characters is related to the category in which they belong, as well as the presence of an embedded phonetic component.