We report on a psycholinguistic database of Chinese character handwriting based on a large-scale study that involved 203 participants, each handwriting 200 characters randomly sampled from a cohort of 1,600 characters. Apart from collecting writing latencies, durations, and accuracy, we also compiled 14 lexical variables for each character. Regressions showed that frequency, age of acquisition, and the word context (in which a character appears) are all-around and influential predictors of orthographic access (as reflected in writing latency), motor execution of handwriting (as reflected in writing duration), and accuracy. In addition, phonological factors (phonogram status, spelling regularity, and homophone density) impacted orthographic access but not handwriting execution. Semantic factors (imageability and concreteness) only affected accuracy. These results suggest, among other things, that phonology is consulted in orthographic access while handwriting. As the first of its kind, this database can be used as a source of secondary data analyses and a tool for stimulus construction in handwriting research.

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Learning the acoustic and phonological information in lexical tones is significant for learners of tonal languages. Although there is a wealth of knowledge from studies of second language (L2) tone learning, it remains unclear how L2 learners process acoustic versus phonological information differently depending on whether their first language (L1) is a tonal language. In the present study, we first examined proficient L2 learners of Mandarin with tonal and nontonal L1 in a behavioral experiment (identifying a Mandarin tonal continuum) to construct tonal contrasts that could differentiate the phonological from the acoustic information in Mandarin lexical tones for the L2 learners. We then conducted an ERP experiment to investigate these learners’ automatic processing of acoustic and phonological information in Mandarin lexical tones by mismatch negativity (MMN). Although both groups of L2 learners showed similar behavioral identification features for the Mandarin tonal continuum as native speakers, L2 learners with nontonal L1, as compared with both native speakers and L2 learners with tonal L1, showed longer reaction time to the tokens of the Mandarin tonal continuum. More importantly, the MMN data further revealed distinct roles of acoustic and phonological information on the automatic processing of L2 lexical tones between the two groups of L2 learners. Taken together, the results indicate that the processing of acoustic and phonological information in L2 lexical tones may be modulated by L1 experience with a tonal language. The theoretical implications of the current study are discussed in light of models of L2 speech learning.

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