Phonetic radical consistency and non-lexical route development in L2 Chinese: A corpus-based psycholinguistic study

This study provides a systematic psycholinguistic analysis of the 3000 characters prescribed in the Chinese Proficiency Grading Standards for International Chinese Language Education (CPGS). Drawing on the Dual-Route Model of reading and Cognitive Load Theory, it examines how character distribution and phonetic radical consistency influence the developmental trajectory of second language (L2) character acquisition. Characters were classified into phono-semantic compounds (PSCs) and non-phono-semantic characters (NPSCs), with phonetic transparency quantified via a 6-point scoring system. We further distinguished between external consistency (radical-to-character mapping) and internal consistency (regularity within radical families). Results indicate that PSCs constitute 65.9% of the corpus, with their density increasing markedly from approximately 35% at Level 1 to nearly 80% at Levels 7-9. This distribution reveals a "beginner bottleneck" where low sublexical support necessitates a reliance on the lexical route (rote memorization), imposing a high intrinsic cognitive load. Furthermore, nearly half of the NPSCs (46.97%) were found to function as latent phonetic radicals, providing critical scaffolding for later acquisition. The analysis identified 194 high-value phonetic radicals that support the non-lexical route through both direct mapping and orthographic analogy. These findings suggest that even when phonetic transparency is low, high internal consistency allows for analogical inference, effectively shifting cognitive resources toward germane load. This study offers a data-driven framework for an actionable pedagogical syllabus, prioritizing high-value radicals to bootstrap sublexical processing and optimize the cognitive rebalancing required for efficient L2 Chinese literacy development.