Effects of Pinyin and Script Type on Verbal Processing: Comparisons of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong Experience

Abstract

Children in the People's Republic of China (PRC) learn to read Chinese using a simplified script by pinyin, an alphabetic system. Taiwanese children learn Chinese using traditional characters and pinyin, Hong Kong children also learn Chinese with traditional characters, but without pinyin. The effects of these experiences were assessed by comparing children's performance on three tasks relevant to verbal processing. This study involved groups of children from each of the three places, China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Three tasks were used: pseudohomophone naming, similarity judgement, and lexical decision. The results showed that the PRC children and Taiwanese children performed better than the Hong Kong children in the naming of pseudohomophones. In the similarity judgement task, the children were required to choose between two response words, one of which was similar to the target word in pronunciation and the other in appearance. The PRC children tended to choose the visually similar reponse words more often than did the Taiwanese and Hong Kong children. In the lexical decision task, the PRC children were far less accurate than the other children in rejecting nonwords as real words. These results suggest that pinyin training helps readers pronounce unfamiliar words by facilitating the extraction of phonological information for pronunciation and that the PRC children's experience in learning the simplified Chinese script has made them more responsive to visual information but less precise in word recognition.