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The present study explored the developmental trend of orthographic awareness in Chinese-speaking preschoolers. A total of 184 children between 3 and 5 years of age participated in the study. Two developmental patterns of orthographic awareness were obtained. One pattern was dependent on a traditional Chinese orthographic hierarchy, with a sequence of writing system specificity, radical, whole character, radical combination rules, and stroke. Three-year-olds fully understood the writing-system-specific features of Chinese characters, and could distinguish characters from alphabetic scripts and drawings; the average accuracy was [80 %.Five-year-olds were able to distinguish radicals from numbers, as well as regard non-characters with rotated radicals and missing radicals as illegal; the average accuracy was 87 %. At 5 years of age, children could detect whole character rotated non-characters with an average accuracy of 78 %, but were not proficient in identifying non-characters with absent strokes (the average accuracy was 69 %). The 5-year-old children did not know well about radical combination rules; the average accuracy was 67 %. The other pattern was associated with violation means of noncharacters, which could be characterized as progressing from form types, to spatial formats, and finally to combination conventions. Children grasped legal form types of scripts (Chinese characters and radicals) at 3 years of age, with an average accuracy approaching 80 %. Five-year-old children detected illegal spatial characteristics of characters, such as up-down reversal, with an average accuracy of 78 %. However, children were unable to understand radical combination conventions even at 5 years of age; average accuracy was 67 %.

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