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As hypothesized by the unified competition model (MacWhinney, 2007, 2017, 2021), optimizing training schemes can enhance second language (L2) learning by fostering various protective factors. Under such a framework, the current study focuses on how the familiarity of stimuli will affect learning Chinese phonetic skills in a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) environment. Two training conditions, i.e., training with familiar stimuli from the textbook and unfamiliar stimuli from novelty design, were administered for two groups of learners at American universities, where the classroom instructions were integrated with the Pinyin Tutor—an online spoken Chinese learning platform hosted under TalkBank. The results show that training with novelty stimuli leads to a greater pretest–posttest improvement for intermediate learners, whereas more significant improvement has been observed in training with familiar stimuli among beginning learners. The learning-enhancing power of the Pinyin Tutor is evidenced by the overall significance of the pretest–posttest improvement when consolidating the results of the two conditions. Furthermore, high retention has been demonstrated in all six aspects of the Pinyin knowledge as tested by a three-month-after delayed posttest. These findings tend to endorse a differentiated design of instructional materials with increasing novelty components as the level of L2 learning advances. The overall significant learning-boosting results accredit the design of the Pinyin Tutor, where the technological architecture and algorithms were integrated with psycholinguistic and pedagogical theories. Suggestions and implications for smart learning in general are presented.

Cipher skills are a prerequisite for reading any alphabet‐based written language. They are essential for both phonic decoding and for developing word‐specific knowledge. Orthographic knowledge functions on two levels. First, children learn what are permissible or impermissible strings of letters in English. This is referred to as orthotactic awareness or graphotactic awareness. Second, orthographic knowledge refers to the accumulation of familiar sequences, whether whole words or word parts. Two common experimental tasks that are used to test orthographic skills are the wordlikeness task and the homophone or pseudohomophone task. Most of the commercially available normed tests of phonics skills use nonsense word tasks, which do not presume any particular type or level of phonics instruction. Nonsense word reading is not an adequate substitute for phonological awareness assessment, even though nonsense word reading is often considered to be one of the phonological processing skills.