1. Cognitive Processing in Non-
Alphabetic Languages
Joseph Tinkham

2. Background
● approximately 1.2 billion
native speakers worldwide
● Chinese is further
subdivided into 12 different
dialects, each of which
share the same written
language, but differ in
pronunciation
○ Even the main Chinese
dialect, Mandarin, has
more speakers world-wide
than both Spanish and
English combined

3. Writing System
● The orthographic system of the Chinese writing system is
made up of 4 different levels:
○ strokes, or the individual lines;
○ radicals, or simple semantic and phonetic characters;
○ characters, or complex, multi-radical characters;
○ and words, consisting of multiple characters
● Morphosyllabic language, meaning that each character is
both a morpheme and a syllable
● Compared with most alphabetic systems, Chinese does not
use spacing to separate words

4. Character Composition
● Chinese characters are generally composed of several
radicals and give some clue as to semantic and phonetic
composition of the character
● radicals are then arranged into various positions (e.g.
left, right, top, bottom), which distinguish them from
other characters with similar or the same radicals
○ similar to English words that share the same letters
○ e.g. Dog and God
● positional specificity in radical representation is how two
characters with the same radicals but in reverse
positions (top-bottom and bottom-top) are not confusable
● radicals are represented in lexical memory separately of
each other

5. Character Composition continued
● Research has found that simple and complex characters
are processed on different orthographic levels and that
radicals are processed similarly both when they are
simple characters and when they are part of a complex
character
● Research also suggests that position is a significant
characteristic in processing radicals

6. Cognitive Processes
● Research found that characters and words are both
important in reading Chinese, but processing characters
are likely important because it affects how words are
processed
● Researchers found that both the no spacing and word
spacing conditions produces shorter reading times than
the character and non word spacing conditions
● The perceptual span to the left and right of a fixation
while reading Chinese is 1 character to the left and 2 to 3
characters to the right. For English, the perceptual span
to the left and right of a fixation is 3 to 4 letters to the
left and 14-15 letters to the right. Average saccade
lengths for Chinese readers is about 2.6 characters,

7. Bilingual Language Development
● In English speakers, morphological awareness is thought
to develop when a child is aware of and can manipulate
suffixes. However, an important element of morphological
awareness in Chinese languages is radical awareness,
which is the awareness of semantic and phonetic radicals
and the ability to use semantic radicals to complete a
sentence without knowing that specific character
○ research found morphological awareness improved with
age in Chinese native speakers

8. Bilingual Language Development cont.
● Past research on bilingual's knowledge of additional
languages aid language acquisition in other languages,
however, a study hypothesized that if the two languages
had different writing systems, this benefit would fail to
be present
● Research found that the bilingual English-Cantonese
group showed no benefit from knowing English when they
began learning Cantonese, but the bilingual Cantonese-
English group showed a benefit from knowing Cantonese
when they began learning English.
○ thought to be transfer of morphological awareness
skills, useful in both languages
○ also differences in education systems thought to

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