Chinese Character Design Essay

Chinese character design
As mentioned in the introduction, Chinese writing system is described as logographic. Sice each logogram in Chinese writing system, the character, corresponds to a morpheme and also a syllable, it is also described as a morphosyllabic system (Perfetti & Zhang, 1995 R11). Chinese characters are square-like patterns formed from strokes. Over 80% of Chinese characters are phonetic compound made up of semantic and phonetic radicals (Chen, 1996 S13). There is a tendency that semantic radicals usually appear on the left of phonetic compounds while phonetic radicals usually appear on the right of the phonetic compounds. Feldman and Siok (1997) estimated that this tendency holds for at least 75% of Chinese phonetic compounds.

These studies support the presence of the radical level of representation during character recognition. There are studies concerning consistency of character. Yang and Peng (1997S6) conducted a study investigating the consistency effect through naming task by primary school students. They made use of consistent phonetic compounds, inconsistent phonetic compounds as two of the four types of stimuli. There was a significant consistency effect for students across different grades. Characters with higher consistency were read better than those with lower consistency. The study by Lee and her colleagues (2005S13) focused on regularity of character. They conducted three character naming experiments and manipulating properties including character frequency, consistency and regularity. They found that regularity effect was only observed when naming low frequency characters. There are also studies suggesting that neighborhood size of a radical will affect Chinese word character recognition. Su and Weekes (2007) conducted an ERP study aiming at investigating the effect of semantic radical combinability (neighborhood size) on character recognition. They found that when the semantic radicals have a larger neighbour size, there is a more direct access to meaning for recognition. Their ERP result also suggested that semantic radical neighborhood size effect on word recognition reflects lexical access. The above studies supported that radicals are a unit of representation that are important for Chinese character recognition. Then, how are they