Abstract: Studies have shown that the orthographic awareness plays an important role in the development of children's literacy. There are three levels in the orthographic system of Chinese characters:strokes, radicals and the whole characters. About the whole characters, a number of literatures reveal that pre-school children could tell the difference between the Chinese characters and those obviously different materials such as numbers, letters, scribbles and so on. The present study aims to investigate the awareness of the characters-specific of Chinese. We analyzed the performance of pre-school children when asked to distinguish Chinese characters from Korean, Japanese (hiragana) and Chinese characters, which are similar in shape. In terms of the radicals, some people think that pre-school children haven't developed the position awareness of radicals. Conversely, some people believe that pre-school children could realize the reasonable position of the radicals. We optimized the experimental design to make clear that whether it has been developed or not. Two studies were designed to investigate the orthographic awareness in Chinese preschool children. We recruited 102 preschool children, who fell into three age groups:4-year-olds, 5-year-olds and 6-year-olds, consisting of 31, 37 and 34 children respectively. Chinese characters, Korean and Japanese characters were used to investigate the specific awareness of Chinese characters. And we used pictophonetic words of up-down and left-right structures to make pseudo-characters and non-characters to investigate the position awareness of the radicals. Children were asked to decide which one was Chinese character. Results showed that children could tell the Japanese was not Chinese characters and at about the age of 5 the ability reached maturity. Children at the age of four could not tell the difference between Chinese and Korean and even for the 6-year-old children, the ability wasn't mature. The results revealed that judging Japanese was easier than Korean and the specific awareness of Chinese characters didn't develop very well at the preschool age. All groups of children could realize that the pseudo-characters conform to the rules of orthography while the ability of judging the non-characters didn't evolve in preschool. They couldn't tell the correct position of the radicals and meanwhile we found that six years old children were more likely to discriminate the non-characters of up-down structures.

Key words: preschool children, orthographic awareness, Chinese characters' specificity, radical position