An ERP Study On The Perception Of The Writing Order Of Chinese Characters By The Second Language Speakers

The purpose of this study was to investigate the neural dynamic mechanism of the second language learners who have a perception of well-learned stroke order.Participants were required to observe stroke by stroke of Chinese characters composed of two components.Meanwhile,the brain activities of the participants was monitored by the ERP technology.The experiment used a precision judgment task,which caused the subjects to focus on the violation of stroke order.The subjects in the experiment are mainly native speakers and the second language speakers.The subjects in the experiment mainly included 20 students in the mother tongue group and 20 students in the second language group,all of whom were college students.They were right-handed and had no history of neurological diseases.Among the 20 people in the second language group,11 are Indonesians and 9 are Thais.In order to eliminate the interference of Chinese learning experience,the second language learners are required to have not learned Chinese characters or Chinese before the age of 12,and their Chinese level has reached intermediate or advanced HSK before participating in the experiment.By comparing the responses of the two groups of subjects,we try to detect whether there is a sequential cognitive processing mechanism on the second language speakers who are similar to the native speakers,and we also hope to get some suggestions on the teaching of stroke order in the teaching of Chinese characters for foreign students on this basis.The experimental results show that :for the critical stroke,within-boundary reversal produces a significant bilateral posterior N2,and cross-boundary reversal induces a decrease in left N2 effect and right posterior N2 effect.And both violations produce the P3 effect.For the stroke displays following the critical ones,both violations induce a continuous negative effect,and the effect is stronger on cross-boundary reversal than within-boundary reversal.On the whole,both native speakers and the second learners have the effect described above,but the effect of the second learners is not stronger than that of the native speakers,which may also reflect the level of expertise of the native speakers on the stroke order of Chinese character.In order to improve the writing level of Chinese characters for the second language learners,we believe that teachers should teach students the basic rules of stroke order in the process of Chinese teaching,so that they can form a normative sense of stroke order in their mind,and when they encounter some "new" characters,they can also think about how to start the stroke order of this Chinese character first.On the one hand,the standardization of stroke order has the significance of being reasonable,beautiful and convenient to write;on the other hand,writing Chinese characters according to the rules of stroke order also conforms to the cognitive significance of sequential processing.However,for those special characters that do not follow the basic rules of writing,the teacher should also promptly point out that it is not necessary to follow the basic rules.