The processing units of writing Chinese characters: a developmental perspective

Abstract

Writing development has generally been assumed to be parasitic to reading development (e.g. Van Orden, Jansen op de Harr, & Bosman, 1997). However, recent studies suggest that writing may not be entirely dependent on reading. Among the limited number of writing studies, the majority of them focus on alphabetic scripts such as English. Chinese script, which is non-alphabetic, receives less attention in writing research. It has been suggested that three sub-character units – stroke, logographeme and radical – are involved in the character writing process. However, their roles in writing are still not clear and their influences on writing and writing development have not been systematically addressed. The present study aimed at studying the relevant processing units in writing development.

Before investigating the roles of different sub-character units in writing, a corpus was established to identify a set of logographemes which can capture the use of logographemes among primary school students. The properties of logographemes were studied, including the lexicality and the frequency across different grades.

After the identification of logographemes, the roles of radical, logographeme and stroke in writing from grades one to six were investigated using a delayed copying task of pseudo-characters. Pseudo-characters were composed varying orthogonally in radical frequency, number of logographemes, and number of strokes. The results show that logographeme number and radical frequency affected the writing performance of students across the six grades. This suggests that both logographeme and radical are prominent processing units across writing development. Significant effect of stroke was found when the logographeme number and the radical frequency were high. This suggests that stroke is a prominent processing unit when the logographemes and radicals are less accessible. It is interesting that the stroke effect was found to be reversed in some specific occasions. Distinctiveness of logographemes is suggested to explain the phenomenon. Finally, the overall results are discussed in terms of the grain size theory (Ziegler & Goswami, 2005).