The influence of writing experiences on holistic processing in Chinese character recognition

Abstract

Holistic processing has been shown to be a behavioral marker of face recognition and object recognition in experts. In contrast, Hsiao and Cottrell (2009) showed that reduced holistic processing is a marker of visual expertise in Chinese character recognition. Here we tested Chinese-literates who can read and write Chinese characters (Writers) and literates whose reading performance far exceeded their writing ability (Limited-writers). We found that Writers perceived Chinese characters less holistically than Limited-writers. In addition to Hsiao and Cottrell's (2009) findings, our study further showed that such reduction in holistic processing can be explained by writing experience in Chinese. This result may be because Chinese Writers exhibit a better awareness of the orthographic components of Chinese characters than Limited-writers due to their writing experience. This study also showed that Limited-writers are better at recognizing a character embedded in a word of a familiar font than when it is alone or of an unfamiliar font, suggesting that their reading performances depend on both the context and font familiarity. This study is also the first to report on the Chinese reading population that has far poorer writing performance than reading performance.