The Interaction between Central and Peripheral Processing in Chinese Handwritten Production: Evidence from the Effect of Lexicality and Radical Complexity

Abstract

The interaction between central and peripheral processing in written word production remains controversial. This study aims to investigate whether the effects of radical complexity and lexicality in central processing cascade into peripheral processing in Chinese written word production. The participants were asked to write characters and non-characters (lexicality) with different radical complexity (few- and many-strokes). The findings indicated that regardless of the lexicality, the writing latencies were longer for characters with higher complexity (the many-strokes condition) than for characters with lower complexity (the few-strokes condition). The participants slowed down their writing execution at the radicals' boundary strokes, which indicated a radical boundary effect in peripheral processing. Interestingly, the lexicality and the radical complexity affected the pattern of shift velocity and writing velocity during the execution of writing. Lexical processing cascades into peripheral processing but only at the beginning of Chinese characters. In contrast, the radical complexity influenced the execution of handwriting movement throughout the entire character, and the pattern of the effect interacted with the character frequency. These results suggest that the processes of the lexicality and the radical complexity function during the execution of handwritten word production, which suggests that central processing cascades over peripheral processing during Chinese characters handwriting.

Neural Correlates of Orthographic Access in Mandarin Chinese Writing: An fMRI Study of the Word-Frequency Effect

“…No differences in latency between conditions were detected [ F (2, 91) = 0.6, p = 0.551]. Moreover, correlation analysis demonstrated that writing duration and latency were significantly correlated for high frequency characters ( r = −0.34, p = 0.029), low frequency characters ( r = −0.53, p = 0.002), and geometric symbols ( r = −0.38, p = 0.034), consistent with the interaction viewpoint between central and peripheral processes during writing (Roux et al, 2013 ; Kandel and Perret, 2015 ; Zhang and Feng, 2017 ).…”

Writing difficulties in Alzheimer’s disease and mild cognitive impairment

“…It is widely agreed that increased written latencies reflect increased demands at the central levels of processing (Afonso & Álvarez, 2011;Delattre, Bonin, & Barry, 2006;Zhang & Feng, 2017). Thus, the pattern of results reported here may be consistent with an evolution of the writing difficulties from the most central level of processing (which it would be already affected in MCI) that would progress to affect lower levels of processing in mild AD.…”

Chinese character handwriting: A large-scale behavioral study and a database

“…More recently, Q. Zhang and Feng (2017) investigated whether effects on the central processes of handwriting spill over to the actual handwriting. They found that both lexicality (whether or not an experimental stimulus was a character) and radical complexity (number of strokes) affected the actual execution of handwriting.…”

“…The number of stokes and the number of radicals have also been shown to be important determinants in Chinese character naming (Leck, Weekes, & Chen, 1995;Leong, Cheng, & Mulcahy, 1987;Peng & Wang, 1997;Zhou, Shu, Bi, & Shi, 1999) and to affect handwriting (Q. Zhang & Feng, 2017). In addition, to write a Chinese character, one needs to arrange the radicals in a particular spatial composition (and in a particular temporal order).…”