Visual Processing Of Graphs, Characters And English Words To Chinese Children

Many studies related the difference found in cognitive processing of Chinese from alphabetic scripts such as English to the unique orthography of the Chinese language. Visual processing of different symbols, verbal (Chinese and English) and nonverbal (graphs), was investigated in primary school children from Grade 2, 4 and 6. Significant difference was found between the processing of the three symbol systems, which indicated that different symbols were represented separately or processed differently. Examining the longitudinal development of the correlation between the symbols, we found graph, Chinese character and English word exerted different influence on each other at different grades. It seems that children, at their early learning of language forms, relied more on the skills required for graph processing, and that independent representation structures were established for different symbols with the augmentation of individual's learning experience. We also found a much closer correlation between graph and English word processing for subjects from Grade 6 than the case for Grade 4 subjects. The reason for this, we think, is that our mature Chinese readers employed the strategies they developed for character processing at their early successful Chinese learning.