Research On Chinese Character Writing Processing Unit

Processing units in handwriting reflects the language storage and retrieval units in human's brains during handwriting process.It is found that the processing units of phonogram is syllable.Chinese Hanzi as logogram is different from phonogram.Relevant studies show that native Chinese speakers and CSL learners will depart hanzi into sub-unit to process,but it is yet to conclude the processing unit of Chinese is whether stroke of radical.Chinese native speakers and naive CSL learners are compared to discuss the processing units of Chinese Hanzi.Research questions include:(1)Are radicals the processing units of Chinese native speakers and naive CSL learners?(2)Are Chinese Hanzi processing units of Chinese native speakers and naive CSL learners influenced by Hanzi structure type?(3)Are Chinese Hanzi processing units of naive CSL learners influenced by native language writing system?Participants of experiments are 42 Arabic native speakers,40 English native speakers and 40 Chinese native speakers.The first two groups are from universities in Egypt and British,who have never learned Chinese before.Experiment materials include 15 Hanzi of up-and-down structure and 13 Hanzi of left-and-right structure(average number of strokes is 4.86).First of all,the interval time between radicals and interval time between strokes inside radical are analyzed.Results show that:(1)the interval time between radicals is longer than interval time between strokes inside radical during the Hanzi writing process of Chinese native speakers;(2)The results of Arabic and English naive CSL learners are the same,the interval time between radicals being longer than interval time between strokes inside radical during the Hanzi writing process;(3)Hanzi structure type has no influence on radical interval effect during the Hanzi writing process of naive CSL learners.Secondly,the place of the longest interval time taking place at is analyzed.Results show that:(1)The frequency of the longest interval taking place between radicals are significantly higher than that between strokes within radical during the Hanzi writing process of Chinese native speakers;(2)The frequency of the longest interval taking place between radicals are significantly higher than that between strokes within radical during the Hanzi writing process of naive CSL learners;(3)The place of the longest interval time taking place at during the Hanzi writing process of both Chinese native speakers and naive CSL learners is not influenced by Hanzi structure type.Above results indicate the obvious existence of radical interval effect during the Hanzi writing process of Chinese native speakers and Arabic and English native speakers at zero level.That the interval time between radicals is longer than that between strokes inside radical and that the longest interval usually takes place between radicals indicating that radicals units of both Chinese native speakers and naive CSL learners.In the aspect of theory,this research provides strong evidence for the chunking effect in Hanzi handwriting production.In the aspect of practice,this research provides the significance of radical to teaching Hanzi.