Applications of GPC rules and character structures in games for learning Chinese characters

Abstract

We demonstrate applications of psycholinguistic and sublexical information for learning Chinese characters. The knowledge about the grapheme-phoneme conversion (GPC) rules of languages has been shown to be highly correlated to the ability of reading alphabetic languages and Chinese. We build and will demo a game platform for strengthening the association of phonological components in Chinese characters with the pronunciations of the characters. Results of a preliminary evaluation of our games indicated significant improvement in learners` response times in Chinese naming tasks. In addition, we construct a Web-based open system for teachers to prepare their own games to best meet their teaching goals. Techniques for decomposing Chinese characters and for comparing the similarity between Chinese characters were employed to recommend lists of Chinese characters for authoring the games. Evaluation of the authoring environment with 20 subjects showed that our system made the authoring of games more effective and efficient.