Abstract: The present study investigated the age-of-acquisition effect in partially-retrieved phonological task with a phonological matching paradigm.In Experiment 1,wholly phonological matching task was used,in which the pinyin of Chinese characters were presented before characters with different age-of-acquisition,and the participants were asked to judge whether the pinyin of characters with different age-of-acquisition was the same as those presented previously.The purpose of Experiment 1 was to explore the validity of phonological matching paradigm. If age-of-acquisition effect,which had been detected in phonological naming task used by previous studies,was also found in this paradigm,then it can be said that such phonological matching paradigm was valid in investigating age-of-acquisition effect.Experiment 2 and 3 adopted consonant matching and vowel matching task respectively,in which the consonant or vowel of Chinese characters were presented before the characters with different age-of-acquisition,then the participants were asked to judge whether the consonant or vowel was the same as the phonological segments presented previously. In Experiment 1,results showed that the reaction times of early acquired Chinese characters were faster than that of late acquired ones,which was in accordance with the results in phonological naming task found in previous studies.Thus,the phonological matching paradigm used by the present study was valid and can be used to explore age-of-acquisition effect.Experiment 2 and 3 found that age-of-acquisition effect can also be detected in partially retrieved phonological task,in which no matter the consonant or vowel of early acquired Chinese characters both were retrieved much easier than that of late acquired ones. Results of the present study indicated that age-of-acquisition effect also existed in partially retrieved phonology.According to the Phonological Completeness Hypothesis,the phonology of early acquired characters was represented as a whole unit,while the phonological representations of late acquired characters were fragmented, therefore it was expected that the early acquired words will be disadvantageous in such partially retrieved phonological task compared with the late acquired characters.However,results of present study were contrary to predictions of the Phonological Completeness hypothesis,thus the present study did not support this hypothesis. While the Arbitrary Mapping Hypothesis put forward that it is the mapping relationship between input and output representations that determined the age-of-acquisition effect.The mapping from orthography to phonology in Chinese characters was relatively arbitrary,thus there should exist age-of-acquisition effect in phonological processing task and such effect may not depend upon whether the phonology was retrieved completely or partially.Therefore, results of present study can be better explained by the Arbitrary Mapping Hypothesis.

Key words: Chinese characters, Age-of-Acquisition, Phonological Completeness Hypothesis