C. W. Hue’s scientific contributions

There are estimates of the number of characters a Chinese college student knows, however, none of the estimates was obtained from empirical studies. In the present study, four groups of Chinese characters were stratified sampled from two dictionaries in accord with the characters' linguistic frequencies. One hundred and twenty college students were recruited from two universities, and they were asked to write down the meanings and the pronunciations for a group of sampled characters. For each meaning and pronunciation responded, the subjects were asked to write down the reason that the response was generated. The results of the study indicated that a college student knows about 5150 characters and a set of strategies to guess the pronunciation and the meaning of an unknown character.