The Development of Taiwanese Children's Ability to Infer Orthographic Information From Semantic and Phonological Information
Chen, Shiou-Yuan
This item is only available for download by members of the University of Illinois community. Students, faculty, and staff at the U of I may log in with your NetID and password to view the item. If you are trying to access an Illinois-restricted dissertation or thesis, you can request a copy through your library's Inter-Library Loan office or purchase a copy directly from ProQuest.
Permalink
https://hdl.handle.net/2142/82313
Description
Title
The Development of Taiwanese Children's Ability to Infer Orthographic Information From Semantic and Phonological Information
Author(s)
Chen, Shiou-Yuan
Issue Date
2000
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Kevin F. Miller
Department of Study
Psychology
Discipline
Psychology
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Language, Linguistics
Language
eng
Abstract
This study explored whether Taiwanese children adopt metalinguistic principles to help their reading and writing development in Chinese, a non-alphabetic language. The relationship between the acquisition of phoneme-grapheme correspondence and reading ability has been well-established for alphabetic orthographies. In Chinese, characters are the basic orthographic units and generally correspond to syllables and morphemes. The orthographic relation between characters in different compound words is highly influenced by their semantic and phonological properties. For example, the character corresponding to chicken is used to compose compound words corresponding to hen and rooster. I hypothesized that Taiwanese children, who are exposed to Chinese characters since early childhood, will adopt different metalinguistic principles developmentally to predict the written forms of unlearned compound words. Experiments showed that when asked to predict the orthographic relation between two characters within two orally-presented compound words, the majority of Taiwanese kindergartners judged on the basis of phonological information. On the other hand, the majority of Taiwanese second graders used both semantic and phonological information to judge the orthographic relation between two characters within two compound words. The use of both semantic and phonological information by Taiwanese second graders can facilitate children's writing development and avoid the burden of learning the written forms of each compound word through formal instruction. In summary, children develop different metalinguistic ability according to the properties of different languages and writing systems. Phonological awareness is important for reading development in alphabetic languages, and strategies that consider both phonological and semantic information are important for reading development in Chinese.
Use this login method if you
don't
have an
@illinois.edu
email address.
(Oops, I do have one)
IDEALS migrated to a new platform on June 23, 2022. If you created
your account prior to this date, you will have to reset your password
using the forgot-password link below.
