Mirror invariance or generalisation is the ability to recognise objects as being the same regardless of their spatial orientation. However, when, for example, learning to read Roman script, children need to hone these skills so that they can readily discriminate between mirror letters such as b/d or p/b. Korean Hangul makes a particularly…

This study investigated the role of orthographic information in the acquisition of non-native speech sounds by monolingual English listeners. Two potentially important orthographic variables were explored: Orthographic compatibility (whether the orthographic information supports or contradicts the distributional information) and orthographic…

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded during a Chinese character decision task to examine whether N400 amplitude is modulated by stimulus font. Results revealed large negative-going ERPs in an N400 time window of 300-500 ms to stimuli presented in degraded Xing Kai Ti (XKT) font compared with more intact Song Ti (ST) font regardless…

This article provides a comparative evaluation of Chinese character reform in the People's Republic of China and Japan, with a particular focus on the latest changes announced in 2009 to the existing script policies in the two countries. The first Chinese script reform took place in 1956 and the first Japanese script reform in 1946, both for the…

This study compares second-year Japanese university students' strategies to write kanji by hand with their strategies to produce the kanji characters on a computer, taking into account factors such as accuracy in writing, the amount of kanji used, the complexity of the kanji used, as well as how the characters used compare with the sequence…

Computer-based writing is already a norm to a large extent in social communication for any major language around the world. From this perspective, it would be pedagogically sound for students to master the Chinese input system as early as possible. This poses some challenges to students in Singapore, most of which are learning Chinese as a second…

This study investigated intellectual development in 4-7 years old Greek and Chinese children. They were examined on speeded performance, working memory, reasoning, and self-awareness tasks in order to investigate possible effects of learning the Chinese logographic system on possible differences in intellectual development between these ethnic…

This study investigated the effects of using Romanized spellings on beginner-level Japanese vocabulary learning. Sixty-one first-semester students at two universities in Arizona were both taught and tested on 40 Japanese content words in a computer-assisted language learning (CALL) program. The primary goal of the study was to examine whether the…