The radicals’ importance for Chinese characters’ cognition
The language curriculum is divided into two tracks in Elementary Chinese at the Chinese Program in Duke University, United States. A survey on how these two groups of students apply the strategies of radical recognition and the strategies of decoding the function of Chinese radicals are investigated in this paper. By examining the process of distinguishing the radicals that are approximate in form, the influence of homophone characters, the consciousness on semantic extension of Chinese radicals, degree of understanding of derivation and so on, the authors found that there are the similarities and differences between the two type of learners. Finally, we discuss the importance of Chinese radicals in the cognitive procedure of Chinese characters from different aspects e.g. writing, aggregating characters and clue to the meanings.
