論   文   摘   要

The study adopts the experimental paradigm being used in Sun's study (1991) to investigate the process of Chinese character encoding by native and non-native readers. The study consists of two experiments： context-free character encoding and context-embedded character encoding. This thesis modifies varying the exposure of the test item in the context-free condition and controlling the length of the sentence in the context-embedded condition.

First, this study examines whether language proficiency or character frequency has any effect on the speed and accuracy of Chinese character encoding. Second, it also investigates the roles of the graphic, phonological, and semantic information in Chinese character encoding.

The result shows that native readers encode Chinese characters faster and more accurately than the non-native readers; however, the speed and accuracy of encoding do not increase with the second language proficiency. Moreover, frequency does not have an effect on the speed of Chinese character encoding; but it has an effect on the accuracy of encoding for the highly proficient non-native readers. Thus, this study suggests that graphic information plays a more important role in Chinese character encoding and the less proficient non-native readers are still quite insensitive to the graphic features of Chinese characters.