The Influence Of Chinese Character Writing On Chinese Character Learning And Related Cognitive Processing

As a traditional way of expression and communication,handwriting is gradually replaced by typing,which is far more convenient in modern society.However,whether the decrease of handwriting will influence our cognitive processing?If the answer is positive,how does the mechanism behind the impact?Previous researches have proved that handwriting can arouse stronger brain activation in larger brain area than typing.Additionally,learning with handwriting can better promote the cognitive processing of letters and characters than typing.Yet few researches have studied such effect on native Chinese speakers.Therefore,based on the previous researches and embodied cognitive theory of handwriting,this research have designed experiments to discuss the impact of handwriting on cognitive processes of Chinese characters.We have further studied how handwriting experience influences the cognitive processing like the operation of imagery as well as insight problem solving.This research includes three experiments.The first experiment is a within subjects design with single factor and two levels,which aimed to explore the learning effects with two different study methods,handwriting and typing.The results showed that handwriting had advantageous effect on orthographic recognition tasks and orthographic-semantic matching tasks,though there was no significant difference of the results in orthographic-pronunciation matching task,the results implied that handwriting lead to better outcome of learning and can better promote the recognition and retrieval of the morphological information and meanings of characters.The second experiment adopted 2(methods of character learning:handwriting vs.typing)*2(whether learned:learned character vs.unlearned character):*6(rotation angle:0°,60°,120°,180°,240-,300°),three-factors mixed design,aiming to study the effect of different learning experience on the mental rotation processing of characters.The results showed that for learned characters,there was significant difference of learning methods,specifically,the speed of mental rotation of handwriting participants were significant slower than the participants of typing group.But for unlearned characters there was no such difference.This result indicated that the experience of handwriting strengthened the processing of the feature information of characters such as the structures,the component and the strokes of them.Such promotion might hinder the rate of mental rotation,in which people tend to process characters as entirety.The third experiment studied the impact of different learning methods on solving the chunk decomposition problems of Chinese characters with 2(methods of character learning:handwriting vs.typing)*2(difficulty:loose vs.tight),two-factors mixed design.The results showed that for tight chunk decomposition problems,the accuracy of handwriting group was significant higher than typing group,but there was no difference in loose chunk decomposition problems.We can imply from the result that the experience of handwriting can inspire the thoughts to help solve the character insight problems.In conclusion,this research found out that handwriting promoted not only the learning and processing of characters themselves,but also cognitive processing of thinking,especially the strengthen of visual spatial representation of characters by handwriting,which contributed to break the mindset,helping the resolution of character insight problems.This research offer empirical support to further research of effect of handwriting on cognitive processing of thinking as well as settle the important foundation for relevant studies.