Writing to Read: the Case of Chinese

Writing to read: the case of Chinese Qi Zhang Ronan G. Reilly School of Applied Languages and Intercultural Studies, Dublin City University Department of Computer Science Maynooth University qi.zhang@dcu.ie ronan.reilly@nuim.ie Abstract This paper describes two experiments that explore the potential role of Chinese character writing on their visual recognition. Taken together, the results suggest that drawing Chinese characters privileges them in memory in a way that facilitates their subsequent visual recognition. This is true even when the congruency of the recognition response and other potential confounds are controlled for. 1 Introduction With China’s rapid economic rise, the Chinese language is becoming more of a practical and attractive subject for university students across the world. There has, consequently, been an increase in the popularity of learning Chinese as a foreign language (henceforth, CFL). According to a report in the Financial Times (Pignal, 2011), only one in 300 elementary schools include Chinese in their curriculum, while one in every 30 was teaching Chinese language by 2008 in the US. In the UK, the number of CFL learners in higher education institutions increased by 125% between 1996 and 2007 (Hu, 2010). Despite the growing demand to learn Chinese, there have been general concerns regarding the difficulties of studying the language. Since the Chinese writing system is logographic in nature, it is significantly different from any European languages that use Roman-derived alphabets. For this reason, one of the main challenges for CFL learners is to learn Chinese characters (Shen, 2004: 168; Wang et al., 2003; Everson, 1998: 196). 2 A brief introduction to Chinese orthography Before we look into the relationship between writing and reading, it is necessary to provide a brief overview of Chinese orthography. There are three tiers in the orthographic structure of a Chinese character: stroke, radical, and character (Shen and Ke, 2007). Usually, several strokes function as building blocks to construct a radical, and one or more radicals are used to form a character. There are generally two kinds of Chinese characters: integral and compound (Shen and Ke, 2007; Wang et al., 2003). The former are composed using one radical only, while the latter consist of two or more radicals. For example, 女 (nǚ) means female and 马 (mǎ) denotes the meaning of a horse. When these two integral characters serve as left and the right radicals, their combination becomes a compound character 妈 (mā) meaning mother. A compound character usually has a semantic radical (i.e., 女 meaning female in the character of 妈) that denotes the meaning of that character and a phonetic radical (马 pronounced as mǎ) that provides insights into the pronunciation of the compound character. Although the Chinese writing system has a pictographic origin, it also has a Romanised form – pinyin – to represent its phonology (Shen and Ke, 2007; Bassetti, 2005; Wang et al., 2003). Each Chinese character can be transcribed into pinyin including onset, rime and tone (Wang et al., 2004). As shown in Table 1 below, 女is represented by pinyin nǚ. ‘n’ …

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