Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Over 80% of Chinese characters are compound characters with semantic and phonetic constituent parts (Hoosain, 1991).These sub-character components provide crucial information for deciphering the character as a whole. Exploring howthey contribute to character processing may help improve us better understand Chinese character processing, especially inChinese-as-a-foreign-language (CFL) learners. How does the combination of character familiarity and character frequencyaffect visual character processing? How do CFL learners and Chinese native speakers differ?A character decision task is used, with masked priming of a semantic radical that is congruent or incongruent with theradical in the target character. A significant difference in RTs between matched and unmatched conditions suggestscharacter decomposition, while no difference implies holistic processing.Results show that character frequency determines whether or not CFL learners process compound characters holistically orin a decomposed manner, even though classroom vocabulary instruction does not follow any type of frequency distribution.