Chinese Alphabet Research Articles

THE Chinese alphabet is said to have been the invention of one Ts'ang Chien, dragon-faced and four-eyed, who patterned the Chinese characters after nature: the stars he saw above him, the marks on the back of the turtle running before him, and the footprints left by birds on the ground below him. And it is said that Brahma searching for a way to write down his teachings, invented the Hindu letters by copying the patterns of the seams of the human skull. The puzzling symbolism of the written word to the ancients, whose bewilderment is conveyed by these legends, remains to confound many of us. A writing system may represent objects on ideas directly, or may, as in our alphabet system, be a transformation of spoken language and represent both sounds and ideas. No matter how representational or abstract the written symbols are, learning from experience with the signs is basic to literacy: reading is an active process involving a learned reaction to symbols or symbols of symbols. Provided an opportunity for experience with two-dimensional representations, the mastery of reading skill should proceed as one's own writing system becomes increasingly familiar. When it does not, we are faced with a reading problem and have to look further. There are many useful conceptual templates one might choose to use in examining the clinical and research findings related to reading disability; one also confronts an impressive array of terminological offerings. The present paper uses the term "dyslexia," and regards reading disability as a major disturbance in adaptive behavior, resulting from deficient mechanisms for processing sensory information.

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