Abstract: Learning new oral vocabulary involves a process of making links between a word's pronunciation (phonology) and its meaning (semantics). Research on alphabetic languages showed orthographic facilitation in children's vocabulary learning depending on their knowledge of grapheme-phoneme connections. However, no research has been conducted to investigate whether similar results might be observed in Chinese vocabulary learning and it is not intuitively obvious because Chinese correspondences between orthography and phonology are less transparent. Two experiments were conducted in the present study to address how orthography-phonology congruence and transparency of meaning influence Chinese vocabulary learning.
In Experiment 1, 40 second graders were taught to associate 12 spoken monosyllable labels with novel-object pictures over four learning trials. Children learned 4 of the monosyllable-picture pairs with regular opaque pseudo-characters which provided congruent phonetic information but no semantic information of the character, 4 monosyllables with irregular opaque pseudo-characters, and 4 monosyllables without any orthography. Three orthographic types were counterbalanced across monosyllables and pictures to form three sets. Children were randomly assigned to one of the three sets. The results showed poorer recall with incongruent characters than with no orthography or with congruent characters. In Experiment 2, 27 first graders were taught another 12 picture-monosyllable associations with regular pseudo-characters or irregular pseudo-characters or no orthography. Transparency of character is also manipulated. Half of items under each condition are transparent characters which provided useful semantic information of the whole character and the other half are opaque characters which provided misleading cues to the character's meaning. Results duplicated the orthographic interference of irregular condition in Experiment 1. Furthermore, the effect of transparency was indicated by better recall with transparent characters than with opaque characters.
These results revealed the role of Chinese orthography in oral vocabulary learning. Exposure to irregular orthography hindered memory of words. But transparent characters boosted children's memory of pronunciation-meaning associations. The current study extends orthography effect from alphabetic languages to Chinese, a non-alphabetic language where phonology is not readily inferred from orthography. The orthographic effect should be given full consideration in future Chinese vocabulary teaching.

Key words: vocabulary learning, Chinese character, regularity, transparency, paired-associated learning