The present study aims to examine the developmental trajectories of how Chinese school children acquire different kinds of meta-linguistic knowledge of phonetic radicals. A corpus to index phonetic consistency and regularity was established on the basis of the Chinese-language textbooks used in Taiwanese elementary schools. Then, children from the fourth to sixth grades were invited to participate in a naming experiment in which frequency (high and low) and consistency levels (high and low) and character type (regular, irregular, and independent phonogram) were manipulated. The results show that the phoneticconsistency effect emerged in fourth-grade children in reading regular characters. The consistency effect was not found in reading irregular characters until the fifth grade. By the sixth grade, the consistency effect was found in reading all three types of phonograms. The results are congruent with the perspective of statistical learning and suggest that children will gradually realize the function of phonetic radicals, including phonetic regularity and consistency, by learning to read a large number of Chinese characters. These findings can serve as the theoretical foundation for developing effective teaching strategies, computer-assisted instructions, and remedial programs for children with difficulties in learning to read Chinese.