Orthographic and Phonological Processing in Chinese Character Copying – A Preliminary Report

Abstract

In the current study, the effects of orthographic and phonological processing in Chinese character copying were investigated using a data set extracted from a database containing handwriting data of 856 stimuli; the responses of which were collected from 100 participants. To investigate the effect of character frequency, radical frequency, and phonetic regularity, 151 phonetic compounds were selected from the database because (1) their corresponding phonetic radicals were all free-standing characters, (2) their corresponding phonetic radicals were located at either the right or the bottom positions in the characters, and (3) no more than 10% of the participants made errors when copying these target characters. The results of the linear mixed effect models revealed that after controlling for inter-stroke distance (ISD) and stroke number, the inter-stroke intervals (ISIs) at the radical and logographeme boundaries were significantly longer, indicating significant orthographic processing in the immediate copying task that radicals and logographemes were used as writing units. In addition, shorter ISIs at the logographeme boundary associated with higher radical frequency, and shorter ISIs at the radical boundary associated with higher character frequency and regular characters, were observed. These observations indicated significant orthographic and phonological effects in the immediate copying task. Finally, the significant phonetic regularity effect observed also supported the notion that phonology contributes to Chinese character writing and that the effects of central processing, including character frequency and phonetic regularity, cascade over peripheral processing during Chinese character copying.

Measuring Orthographic Knowledge of L2 Chinese Learners in Vietnam Using a Handwriting Task – A Preliminary Report

“…Moreover, results also showed that shorter ISIs are associated with characters with higher frequency. Once again, this is consistent with previous observations among L1 Chinese users ( Lau, 2019 , 2020a ). Lau (2020a) suggested that the character frequency effect may reflect that the time needed to retrieve and/or plan for the writing of high frequency writing units are shorter than that of low frequency writing units.…”

“…Once again, this is consistent with previous observations among L1 Chinese users ( Lau, 2019 , 2020a ). Lau (2020a) suggested that the character frequency effect may reflect that the time needed to retrieve and/or plan for the writing of high frequency writing units are shorter than that of low frequency writing units. Alternatively, it is also possible that the delayed copying of low frequency characters relies heavily on the non-lexical approach, which induces heavier demands in short term memory given the lack of support from long term lexical memory.…”

“…Besides, the results showed that longer ISIs are associated with characters with more strokes. Again, this is consistent with previous observations among L1 Chinese users (e.g., Lau, 2020a , b ). Lau (2020b) suggested that the positive correlation between number of strokes and ISIs may be due to more processing units being temporarily stored in the orthographic output buffer, which induced heavier processing demand during the writing process.…”

“…Finally, the results showed longer ISIs at radical boundaries and logographeme boundaries in general. Such significant boundary effect was reported in previous reports among L1 Chinese users ( Lau, 2019 , 2020a , b ). Lau (2020b) suggested that the longer ISIs located at the orthographic unit boundaries were attributed to longer time required to retrieve the writing units.…”

“…Finally, given the success of the current study in using the delayed copying task to measure orthographic awareness of L2 Chinese learners, it is suggested that future studies should make better use of similar handwriting experiments to investigate other areas of orthographic awareness, required for writing Chinese characters, such as positional consistency of orthographic units. Besides, previous experiments also reported significant phonetic regularity effect among L1 Chinese users' handwriting performance (e.g., Lau, 2020a). Future studies involving experiments of similar construct are recommended to investigate L2 Chinese learners' knowledge of the functions of phonetic and semantic radicals of Chinese characters.…”