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The Chinese language includes a number of varieties or dialects of the language. Mandarin, the most widely spoken Chinese language, forms the basis for Standard Mandarin, or Putonghua. Putonghua serves as the national lingua franca in China and is the official form of Chinese that is used as the language of instruction in schools in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). As such, it is also a second language for the many speakers of Chinese dialects other than Mandarin. Therefore, the language described as Chinese in this chapter is Mandarin unless otherwise noted. Chinese employs a logographic writing system (DeFrancis, 1989; Mattingly, 1992; Perfetti & Zhang, 1995) in which the basic grapheme is a character, a symbol that represents a morpheme. Each character maps onto a syllable that is a morpheme or word. Since the characters correspond to morphemes rather than the individual sounds of the spoken language, speakers of different Chinese languages may understand the script, even though the spoken languages are not mutually intelligible. Chinese is also a tonal language in which tones distinguish meaning. There are four tones in Mandarin (high-level, high-rising, falling-rising, and high falling); the number of tones varies by dialect.