Learning Chinese characters poses a significant challenge for Chinese as a second language learners.As the majority of Chinese characters are pictophonetic,exploring the mechanism of learning pictophonetic characters can provide more target-ed and differentiated teaching.Based on previous research,this study hypothesizes that rule-based visual-verbal paired-associ-ate learning(PAL)is one of the main mechanisms for learning pictophonetic characters.To test this hypothesis,modifications were made to traditional PAL materials by incorporating the corresponding rules of form and sound(FSC rule)into the PAL ma-terials.A group of learners of Chinese with rudimentary proficiency was invited to complete both a rule-based visual-verbal PAL task and a pictophonetic character learning task.The results confirm the hypothesis,showing that learners who are good at discovering implicit FSC rules have learned more novel characters than those who are not.Additionally,these learners were able to transfer newly learned phonetic rules to other phonetic characters.Therefore,it is recommended that when teaching Chinese characters,teachers should direct learners who struggle with rule discovery to focus on phonetic radicals,highlight the regulari-ty of phonetic radicals by listing members of the same phonetic radical family and encourage students to utilize all or part of the pronunciation information provided by phonetic radicals in their learning and memorization of Chinese characters.
Second language learnerpaired-associate learningpictophonetic character learningorthography-phonology correspondence rules
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
