ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the published studies on the psycholinguistics of Chinese language and analyzes their educational implications. Chinese is a monosyllabic and tone language which is deeply orthographic, as defined by its transparency and the degree of its letter-to-phoneme correspondence. The Chinese language is written using Chinese characters, of which there are two forms: the traditional Chinese character and the simplified Chinese character. At the orthographic level, Chinese has very different principle by which the graphic units are mapped onto linguistic units. Literacy is a highly valued and uniquely human phenomenon that differentiates humans from animals. Literacy has become a code word across a range of disciplines for new views of reading and writing. Chinese character has a certain shape and different degrees of complexity in terms of its strokes. This will affect learners' short-term memory (STM) and implicit memory retention, which has been frequently explored recently.
