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THE INFLUENCE OF ORTHOGRAPHY ON ORAL VOCABULARY ACQUISITION IN LEARNERS OF CHINESE AS A SECOND LANGUAGE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 June 2021

Jie Zhang ,
Hong Li Open the ORCID record for Hong Li [Opens in a new window]  and
Yang Liu
Jie Zhang*
Affiliation:
University of Houston
Hong Li*
Affiliation:
Beijing Normal University
Yang Liu*
Affiliation:
Western Kentucky University
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Hong Li, Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, National Demonstration Center for Experimental Psychology Education (Beijing Normal University), Institute of Children’s Reading and Learning, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Xin Jie Kou Wai Street #19, Beijing100875, PR China. E-mail: psy.lihong@bnu.edu.cn
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Abstract

The present study investigated the effects of exposure to Chinese orthography on learning phonological forms of new words in learners of Chinese as a second language. A total of 30 adult learners of Chinese studied spoken label and picture associations presented either with phonologically accurate characters, characters with partial phonological information, or no orthography. Half the phonologically accurate or partially accurate characters were semantically transparent or opaque. Spoken labels were recalled without orthography presence. Results showed that exposure to phonologically accurate and semantically transparent characters during learning did not enhance the recall of the spoken labels compared to no orthography. But exposure to characters with partial phonological information and semantically opaque characters significantly hindered vocabulary learning. The implications for Chinese as a second language vocabulary acquisition and instruction are discussed.

Type
Research Report
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 43 , Issue 5 , December 2021 , pp. 1157 - 1172
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This research project was supported by grants from Western Kentucky University Office of Research to JZ. This work was also supported by grants from the Ministry of Education of the People’s Republic of China (17YJA190009) to HL. We acknowledge all participating teachers, students, and parents. We also thank the undergraduates from Western Kentucky University for their assistance in data collection.

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