The purpose of this study was to investigate how the acquisition of Chinese characters among beginning Chinese readers is affected by the visual complexity and the presence of radicals and how the effect changes across grades. Participants included 325 first through third graders in China. 48 pseudo characters were created and used in the character-recognition task to evaluate their ability to acquire different types of characters varying in visual complexity and radical presence. Chinese orthography-choice task (Wang et al., 2005) and Wide Range Achievement Test (expanded edition, level 1) were used to assess children's radical awareness and non-verbal IQ. Repeated measure analysis showed that the effect of visual complexity, radical, their interaction, and grade were all significant (p .01 for all measures). Correlation analysis indicated that students' performance in the main task was significantly correlated with non-verbal IQ, but not with radical awareness.
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