Does Age Of Acquisition Or Word Frequency Affect Chinese Writing Words From Picture?

Language is a common social phenomenon. It is vital for the civilization of society and it plays very important role in people’s development. In our daily life, when we are working or studying, when start thinking, memorizing things, sensing things or perceptions feelings, we are all involving with language. We cannot finish above without language, even though we don’t have to speak or writing it out every single time. Though language is a complex system of symbols, we still can use it easily. Psychologists and neuro-scientists are fascinated by how it happens and what the processing mechanism is when we use it freely.Language production normally contains three main aspects: speech production, writing production and body sign language. Among them, the speech production research got the most attention from Psychologist. Writing production got less attention while the sign language is the least one. The purpose of this study is to explore the age acquisition effect and frequency effect in the process of Chinese writing production. Using picture naming paradigm, we manipulate the word frequency variable(high frequency word and low frequency word) and the age of acquisition(early learned word and late learned word), to investigate if they affect the Chinese word writing process. We design the experiment and ask the subjects to write the picture name as quickly and accurately as possible, once the picture is showing on the screen. During the experiment, we record their response latency and accuracy for their hand writing. Then we analyze the statistics by ANOVA with SPSS 20.0 software. Basing the result, we can check out which one is the real vital factor for the Chinese word writing. We hope to compare the processing mechanism between Chinese word writing with Western alphabetic writing and offer some useful reference for further studies.Using 2 x 2 factor design, we recruited 20 students from local university of Beijing as our subjects. We tried to investigate how the two factors(word frequency and the age of acquisition) affect the process of writing picture name.The results of the experiment showed that:(1) Word frequency dose not affect the response potential of the writing process while it affects the accuracy of writing.(2)The age of acquisition variable has significant effects in both the picture name writing response latency and its accuracy. Those words of early acquired needs shorter response latency than those of late acquired. And the correct rate is also higher.(3)No significant interaction has been found between these 2 factors. We can conclude that the main influence factor of Chinese writing process is the age of acquisition of the word. It means the earlier learned words have obliviously advantages than those late learned words in response speed and accuracy.