A phonetic radical account of the phonology-to-Orthography consistency effect on writing Chinese characters: Evidence from a Chinese Dysgraphic patient

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the sublexical route in writing Chinese characters. Using a writing-to-dictation task, we compared neurotypical participants’ performance on writing a set of 40 characters with homophones sharing different phonetic radicals and another set of 40 characters with homophones sharing the same phonetic radicals. The first set of stimuli was regarded as both syllable-to-character and syllable-to-radical inconsistent, while the second set of stimuli was considered syllable-to-radical consistent but syllable-to-character inconsistent. The results of the error analysis showed that the control participants demonstrated a greater tendency to make errors with preserved phonetic radicals in the second set of stimuli. Furthermore, we conducted the same task with a Chinese brain-injured patient, WCY, who had mild dyslexia and severe dysgraphia associated with mild impairment to the lexical semantic route as shown by the patient’s character writing. The results showed that WCY demonstrated similar error patterns as those of the control participants and a shorter writing time in the second set of stimuli. Altogether, the observations were taken as evidence that supported our claim that a syllable-to-phonetic radical route governs the sublexical route in Chinese character writing.

KEYWORDS:

• Phonology-to-orthography consistency
• Chinese
• writing
• dysgraphia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Since this study was conducted in Hong Kong, where traditional Chinese characters and Cantonese are used, in this paper, phonetic transcriptions are represented in jyutping, a romanization system developed by the Linguistic Society of Hong Kong.

2 This only applies to phonetic compounds with no homophones. About one-third of the characters without homophones in Chinese are non-phonetic compounds (i.e., characters without phonetic and semantic radicals that give clues to sound and meaning) according to the Hong Kong Corpus of Chinese News-Paper (Leung & Lau, 2010). Therefore, it is not always possible to define the syllable-to-radical consistency of characters in Category (a).