[Omission rate of the "de": a study on the reading unit]

The purpose of the present study is to explore both the effects of age and the semantic and syntactic structures of reading materials on the omission rate of "de", the most frequently used character in Mandarin. In the first experiment, 95 college students were asked to circle the radical while reading 3 kinds of materials. The results showed that the conditional error percentage for essay material is higher than that for non-essay materials. While reading meaningful essays, subjects perceived "de" in character form. But, when reading meaningless non-essay material, subjects perceived it in radical form. In the second experiment, college students and primary school students, grades 2, 4 and 6, were asked to read 2 stories which included 8 kinds of semantic and syntactic functions of "de" phrases. The results were: (1) the more complex the semantic and syntactic functions of "de", the lower the omission rate of "de" phrases, (2) the omission rates were influenced by age and the kind of "de" phrase.