In the past fifteen years, we have systematically investigated the acquisition of Chinese characters and words.
Metalinguistic awareness is highly related to reading development of Chinese children.
Starting at third grade, children show regularity effect and consistency effect in learning and deriving new compound characters. They can rapidly decompose a compound character, and be aware of the role of the phonetic part in pronunciation and the radical part in meaning access. The importance of metalinguistic awareness comes from the two further studies. First, statistical analysis of the school corpus indicates that the phonetic and radical regularity is relatively high in low frequency characters. Second, our experiments show that phonetic information is helpful in memorizing new characters.