The Structure of Orthographic Representations of Chinese Characters: from the Perspective of the Cognitive Neuropsychological Approach

In this paper, the view that Chinese characters do not carry phonological information and the view that they are pictographs are argued to be incorrect. On the contrary, Chinese orthographs have considerable phonetic information, similar to alphabetic writing systems, and they have internal structure. Evidence for this claim is drawn from findings concerning the reading performances of normal Chinese subjects and of a brain-injured patient, and the writing performance of Chinese dysgraphic patients. In particular, normal subjects were found to name phonetic compounds whose phonetic component has a high consistency value faster than those containing a phonetic component low in consistency value. This effect of consistency was also observed in the reading of pseudo-characters made up of a signific and a phonetic (Fang, Horng, and Tzeng 1986; Hue and Erickson 1988; Lian 1985). The non-phonetic view regarding the Chinese writing system contends that Chinese lacks a non-lexical route of reading; it thus implies that character reading is achieved post-lexically. However, this is seriously challenged by a report about a Chinese brain-damaged patient who could read invented as well as real characters effortlessly, despite little comprehension of the characters (Tzeng, Hung, Lu, Chen, and Hu 1992).