The Cognitive Deficits In The Early Stage Of Chinese Character Recognition For Children With Spelling Difficulties

According to the theory of "Overall Processing Defect",children with spelling difficulties in chinese have defects in the whole character recognition function,and too much attention is paid to components,which leads to low memory level of whole character glyphs and difficulty in effectively extracting Chinese character glyphs.This theory has been supported by many research results.However,few studies have investigated at which stage of Chinese character recognition the overall processing deficit appears in children with spelling difficulties.Proficient Chinese readers can understand the vocabulary and even extract the Chinese character parts according to the outline of Chinese characters in a very short time,which reflects people’s automatic processing tendency for Chinese characters.Perceptual Interference effect and Repetition Blindness effect are two classical paradigms to investigate the early processing of Chinese characters.The former pays more attention to whether the overall contour of Chinese characters can activate the vocabulary access process,and the latter pays more attention to whether the local units(such as the individual characters in the phrase,the parts and strokes in the whole character,etc.)are independent in the early recognition.Based on these two paradigms,this study will investigate the cognitive processing characteristics of whole characters,components and strokes of children with spelling difficulties in the early stage of glyphs recognition.The three experiments in Study 1 all used Perceptual Interference paradigm to investigate the automatic processing of early Chinese characters in children with spelling difficulties.The interference effect of Chinese character perception refers to that in the early stage of perception,it is more difficult to recognize Chinese characters when they are presented gradually from vague to clear(progressive condition)than when they are presented clearly all at once(standard condition).This effect reflects the process of people trying to access words based on fuzzy glyphs information in the early stage of glyphs recognition.In experiment 1,children were asked to recall the whole Chinese character,in experiment 2 they were asked to recall a component of a Chinese character,and in experiment 3 they were asked to recall a stroke of a Chinese character.The results of the three experiments were similar.Although the accuracy of the children in the group with spelling difficulties was significantly lower than that in the control group,all the children did not show the perceptual interference effect of Chinese characters/components/strokes,but showed the promotion effect,which may be related to the low storage of Chinese characters in children.There was no significant difference in perceptual promoting effect between the two groups.Interestingly,a comprehensive comparison of the results of the three experiments showed that children with spelling difficulties performed abnormally in the stroke perception task,and the accuracy was significantly lower than that of whole words and components,suggesting that children with spelling difficulties had abnormal early stroke recognition.The three experiments in Study 2 all used the Repetition Blindness paradigm to investigate the early perceptual processing characteristics of children with spelling difficulties.Repetitive blindness effect refers to the obstruction in recalling repetitive stimuli during Rapid Serial Visual Presentation(RSVP)tasks.This effect reflects the representational independence of repeated stimuli in early processing.In experiment 1,the repetition blindness effect of single character was investigated.In experiment 2,the repetition blindness effect of components in double-component Chinese characters was investigated.Experiment 3 investigated the repetition blindness effect of Chinese strokes.A comprehensive comparison of the results of the three experiments showed that the accuracy of children with spelling difficulties was significantly lower than that of children in the control group,but there were differences in the performance of children in the two groups under different writing tasks.At the whole word level,repetition blindness effect was found in children with spelling difficulties,but the effect size was significantly lower than that in the control group.At the component level,children with spelling difficulties did not have repetition blindness effect,while children in the control group had repetition blindness effect.There was no repetition blindness effect at the stroke level in both groups.The results of study 1 and Study 2 showed that:1)Children with spelling difficulties lagged behind normal children in early character recognition at the level of whole characters,components and strokes;Among them,the visual representation accuracy of strokes showed the greatest difference from that of normal children.2)Both children with spelling difficulties and normal children could start the automatic lexical access process based on fuzzy stimulus in the early stage of glyphs recognition,but the effect was perceptual promotion rather than perceptual interference.3)The whole word representation independence of children with spelling difficulties is weaker than that of normal children,and it is difficult to represent components independently;Both groups of children did not show independent representation of strokes.The Chinese character recognition defects of children with spelling dificulties are obviously affected by the processing of Chinese character components and their subsequent functions,which provides a way to improve the writing performance of children with spelling difficulties.