The phonetic component in Chinese characters is assessed automatically in reading. The psychology of reading characters reveals that native readers have a genuine assessment of the phonetic...Show moreThe phonetic component in Chinese characters is assessed automatically in reading. The psychology of reading characters reveals that native readers have a genuine assessment of the phonetic component. It facilitates the reading of compound characters with beneficial statistical values in the corpus. This highlights the importance of reading experience. The native reader serves as a blueprint for an "ideal" near-native reader. In the psychology of learning Chinese as a second script, there are possibilities and constraints regarding this goal. In order to approximate near-native reading, non-native learners need to acquire a flexible and comprehensive assessment of the phonetic component. Long-term study of graphs and their individual parts as well as reading experience are essential.Show less