The Influence of Chinese Proficiency and Cultural Background on CFL Learners’ Comprehension of Chinese Logogriphs

Abstract This study investigates how Chinese logogriphs are comprehended by learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) with different Chinese proficiencies and cultural backgrounds. Eighty-eight CFL learners from four cultures (South Koreans, Southeast Asians, Western Caucasians and Arabs) were divided into two Chinese proficiency groups according to their HSK scores, and 15 L1 Chinese speakers also took part in the experiment as a control group. The participants were asked to write down how they interpreted Chinese logogriphs in questionnaires. An ANOVA analysis was conducted to examine the effects of Chinese proficiency and cultural background on logogriph comprehension. The results indicate that the accuracy of logogriph comprehension and the frequency of adopting logogriph-solving strategies positively correlated with the learners’ Chinese proficiency, and that those with higher proficiency used more linguistic and cultural knowledge of the target language. As for cultural influence, Western Caucasians tended to think more visually than the other three cultural groups, and South Koreans and Southeast Asians were better at activating Chinese semantic knowledge. The closer the CFL learners’ culture is to Chinese culture, the more similar strategies they adopted to those of L1 Chinese participants. Moreover, the participants’ Chinese proficiency and cultural background show an interactive effect on their logogriph comprehension, with the former factor having a greater influence than the latter in this process.