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Written word recognition in Chinese links the perception of individual characters with whole words. With experience in reading, a high-quality word representation can provide top-down influence on the perception of its constituent characters, thus producing a word superiority effect (WSE). In experiments using the Reicher–Wheeler paradigm, we examined the WSE in two-character words for native Chinese readers (Experiment 1) and low-proficiency adult Chinese learners with Thai (Experiment 2a) and Indonesian (Experiment 2b) as native language backgrounds. For native Chinese readers, the WSE was smaller for high-frequency than low-frequency characters, reflecting rapid access to more frequently experienced characters and a consequent reduction of top-down word-level effects. Learners of Chinese, however, showed a strong WSE for both low-frequency and high-frequency characters, reflecting less well-established character representations combined with word-level knowledge sufficient to support character recognition. The results suggest that native Chinese readers develop strong representations at both the character and the word level, while low-proficiency Chinese learners are more dependent on the word level. We discuss the possibility that a word-level emphasis Chinese foreign language instruction is one reason for this pattern.
