Writing facilitates learning to read in Chinese through reduction of holistic processing: A developmental study

Writing facilitates learning to read in Chinese through reduction of holistic processing: A developmental study Ricky Van Yip Tso (richie13@hku.hk) Terry Kit-fong Au (terryau@hku.hk) Janet Hui-wen Hsiao (jhsiao@hku.hk) Department of Psychology, University of Hong Kong 604 Knowles Building, Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong SAR Abstract Holistic processing has been identified as an expertise marker of face and object recognition. In contrast, the expertise marker of recognizing Chinese characters is reduced holistic processing (Hsiao & Cottrell, 2009), which is driven by Chinese writing experiences rather than reading ability (Tso, Au, & Hsiao, 2011). Here we investigate the developmental trend of holistic processing in Chinese character recognition and its relationship with reading and writing abilities by testing Chinese children who were learning Chinese at a public elementary school in Hong Kong on these abilities. We found that the holistic processing effect of Chinese characters in children was reduced as they reached higher grades; this reduction was driven by enhanced Chinese literacy rather than age. In addition, we found that writing performance predicts reading performance through reduced holistic processing as a mediator. We thus argue that writing hones analytic processing, which is essential for Chinese character recognition, and in turn facilitates learning to read in Chinese. Keywords: Chinese character recognition, holistic processing, reading, writing, copying Introduction Holistic processing (HP)—the ability to process separate features as a single whole unit—is an expertise marker for face and object recognition (see e.g., Bukach, Gauthier, & Tarr, 2006; Gauthier & Bukach, 2007; Richler, Wong, & Gauthier, 2011; though some argue that it is specific to faces, e.g, McKone, Kanwisher, & Duchaine, 2007). Chinese characters share many visual properties with faces. In contrast to words in most alphabetic languages that are linear in structure and consist of letter series of varying length, the Chinese writing system is logographic—The configuration of Chinese characters is more homogenous and square, and each character is a grapheme that represents a morpheme (Shu, 2003; Wong & Gauthier, 2006). The basic units of a Chinese character are strokes that combine to create more than a thousand different stroke patterns in the Chinese writing system; these stroke patterns form the characters (Hsiao & Shillock, 2006). A typical literate recognizes more than 3,000 individual Chinese characters regardless of variations in font (Hsiao & Cottrell, 2009). This is similar to face recognition in which faces are recognized individually regardless of variations in facial expressions (Hsiao & Cottrell, 2009; Wong & Gauthier, 2006). Despite the similarity between Chinese characters and faces, the expertise marker for Chinese character recognition is reduced HP (Hsiao & Cottrell, 2009). Experienced Chinese readers employ less HP than novices in perceiving Chinese characters; this may be because Chinese readers are more sensitive to the internal constituent components of Chinese characters. They can readily ignore some configural information, such as exact distances between features, which are unimportant for character recognition (Ge, Wang, McGleery, & Lee, 2006). In contrast, these internal constituent components may not look easily separable to novices as they are less able to distinguish individual features and components in Chinese characters (Chen, Allport, & Marshall, 1996; Ho, Ng, & Ng, 2003; Hsiao & Cottrell, 2009). In addition, reduced holistic processing (i.e., analytic processing) of Chinese characters is enhanced by Chinese writing experiences (Tso, Au, & Hsiao, 2011). In Tso and colleagues’ (2011) study, two groups of Chinese readers were tested: Chinese literates who could read and write (i.e., Writers), and Chinese literates who had limited writing exposure and thus had reading performance far better than writing performance (i.e., Limited-writers). Limited-writers had reading performance comparable to Writers’, yet Limited-writers had far poorer performance than Writers in a dictation task (i.e., recall and write down a Chinese word when instructed). Writers perceived Chinese characters less holistically than Limited-writers—this between-group difference in HP could mainly be explained by dictation (writing) performance when the reading and copying variables were statistically controlled. In Hong Kong, elementary schools do not explicitly place emphasis in its curriculum on teaching the Chinese character radicals (i.e., character components that consist of one or more identifiable stroke patterns); yet, children become more aware of the internal orthographic components in Chinese characters as they progress to higher grades (Ho et al., 2003). This may be explained by motor programming through extensive copying and writing as a requirement in Chinese lessons at school (Guan, Liu, Chan, Ye, & Perfetti, 2011; Tan, Spinks, Eden, Perfetti, & Siok, 2005). Reading performance is significantly predicted by copying ability (Chan, Ho, Tsang, Lee, & Chung, 2006; McBride-Chang, Chung, & Tong, 2011; Tan et al., 2005), as well as dictation performance (McBride-Chang et al., 2011; Tse, Kwan, & Ho, 2010). Writing experience may enhance reading ability because children may consolidate knowledge of graphomotor memory of character strokes as they copy the stroke patterns (Tan et al., 2005; Tse et al., 2010). Learning to write was experimentally shown to strengthen Chinese