Orthographic Knowledge of Chinese in Adults of 40 to 65 years

The present study investigated the role of Chinese orthography in the organization of the mental lexicon. In the experiment, four radicals used to carry semantic information and four phonetics used to carry phonological information in pictophonetic characters were presented. Subjects were asked to generate characters that contain the given radicals or phonetics in one minute and write them down. In analysis of variance, there were no significant effect of sex and stimulus types i.e. radicals or phonetics but a significant effect of the size of the pool (i.e. the number of characters containing the given radicals or phonetics a subject knows) on the number of characters retrieved. The findings support a view that the orthographic organization of mental lexicon of Chinese is evident.