Abstract: The study was to explore the effect of word learning age in primary school children's Chinese character recognition. Real characters and pseudo-characters were used as stimuli. Three groups of real characters were used which were selected in the Chinese textbooks of grade 1,3,5 respectively as real characters. The subjects were primary school children from grade 1,3,5 who were required to judge whether a stimulus was a legal character or not. The result showed a strong effect of word learning age in primary school children's LDT of Chinese character.

Key words: learning age, frequency, familiarity, lexical decision task