Development of sub-character processing and the use of orthographical and phonological memories in learning new Chinese characters in primary school-aged normal readers

Normal Hong Kong schoolchildren readers from grades 1, 2 and 3 were involved in this experiment to find out at which grade the sub-character processing is employed to memorize newly learned Chinese characters. Subjects were required to work on a delayed-recall task with pseudo-characters constructed using different radical frequencies controlled across grades. Prior to the recall, verbal and visual intervening tasks were inserted to determine the use of phonological and visual memories in memorizing radicals with different frequencies. A significant frequency effect was found in the second graders but not in the first graders. Results suggested that subcharacter processing to memorize newly learned Chinese characters developed in the children starting from the second grade. The second graders' performances on high frequency radicals were affected by both verbal and visual intervening tasks, but their performances in low frequency radicals were affected more by visual intervening tasks than by verb...