Resumen de The recognition of coordinative compound words by learners of Chinese as a foreign language: a mixed methods study
Jing Sun, Hye K. Pae, Haiyang Ai
Learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) tend to swap the two characters within a coordinative compound word in verbal identification and written production. This mixed methods study not only investigated how CFL learners identified intercharacter orthographic and semantic relationships within two-morpheme coordinative compound words, but also explored how they used decoding strategies to resolve confusion related to constituent characters within compound words. Thirty-two English-speaking learners of Chinese participated in this study. The quantitative strand using a lexical decision task revealed significant character transposition effects and intercharacter semantic similarity effects but nonsignificant intercharacter orthographic similarity effects. Such effects were supported and further complemented by qualitative findings from a semistructured interview on learners' thought processes for compound word recognition. The nonsignificant intercharacter orthographic similarity effects were attributable to the meaning relationships between the constituent characters that shared the same radicals. Taken together, the results suggested that CFL learners tended to perceive compound words as whole units. For pedagogical recommendations, this study emphasized the importance of sublexical radical knowledge, morphological awareness for self-sufficient vocabulary building, and character handwriting for CFL learners' efficient reading development.
