Abstract
Writing and reading are closely related and are thus likely to have a common orthographic representation. A fundamental question in the literature on the production of written Chinese characters concerns the structure of orthographic representations. We report on a Chinese character handwriting pedagogical corpus involving a class of 22 persons, 232 composite character types, 1,913 tokens, and 13,057 stroke records, together with the inter-stroke interval (ISI), which reflects the parallel processing of multilevel orthographic representation during the writing execution, and 50 orthographic variables from the whole character, logographeme, and stroke. The results of regression analyses show that orthographic representation has a hierarchy and that different representational levels are active simultaneously. In the multilevel structure of orthographic representation, the representation of the logographeme is absolutely dominant. Writing and reading have both commonalities and individual differences in their orthographic representations. The online processing of the logographeme unit probably occurs at the ISI before the initial stroke of the current logographeme, which may also cascade to the first subsequent logographeme. In addition, we propose a new effective character structure unit for describing orthographic complexity.
Highlights
Studying how to represent Chinese characters in handwriting can help us gain a deeper understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying writing and Chinese character recognition in reading
The present study made a first systematic analysis on the orthographic representation based on a large-scale pedagogical corpus of handwriting responses by Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) learners to a large sample of characters
We showed that orthographic representation has a hierarchy and that the logographeme is absolutely dominant, three representational levels are active simultaneously during writing execution
Summary
Writing and reading are two forms of word processing. Writing is the process from concept preparation to outputting an orthographic representation, whereas reading is a process of accessing meaning from orthographic representation. In the process of Chinese character learning, writing and reading are often carried out synchronously and have a positive correlation with each other (Tan et al, 2005; Chan et al, 2006). It has been shown that handwriting literacy affects reading literacy, such that both children who speak Chinese as their mother tongue who are better at handwriting and adult learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) who are better at handwriting are better at reading (Tan et al, 2005; Guan et al, 2015).
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