Search

In the present study, we designed a dynamic measure to assess emerging morphological awareness in Chinese children and examined its concurrent and longitudinal relations with character recognition. The initial question of the dynamic assessment of morphological awareness (DAMA) task asked children to judge whether the first morphemes in a pair of words shared the same meaning. Subsequently, up to four prompts were provided for each word in the word pair to draw children's attention to the meaning of the target morpheme as well as the morphological structure of the word. The participants included 154 first-grade Chinese children. In addition to the DAMA task, they received a battery of measures including nonverbal intelligence, rapid automatized naming, phonological awareness, vocabulary knowledge, and Chinese character reading. While all measures were administered at the beginning of grade 1, the character reading measure was administered again at the end of grade 1, and at the beginning and end of grade 2. The results showed that the prompts provided in the DAMA task increased children's ability to identify morpheme meanings in compound words by helping them separate morpheme meanings from word meanings. Furthermore, the DAMA task accounted for significant unique variance in character recognition concurrently at the beginning of grade 1 and longitudinally at all three other time points after controlling for static morphological awareness and other reading related variables. Our study suggests that dynamic assessment can be used to effectively assess morphological awareness and predict character reading abilities in young Chinese children.

Purpose: Dyslexia is characterized by its diverse causes and heterogeneous manifestations. Chinese children with dyslexia exhibit orthographic, phonological, and semantic deficits across character and radical levels when writing. However, whether character dictation can be used to distinguish children with dyslexia from their typically developing peers remains unexplored. Method: A dataset of written characters from 1,015 Chinese children with and without dyslexia from Grades 2-6 was used to train multiple machine models with different learning algorithms. Results: The multi-level multidimensional model reached a predictive accuracy of 78.0%, with stroke, grade, lexicality, and character configuration manifesting as the most predictive features. The accuracy of the model improved to 80.0% when only these features were included. Conclusion: These results not only provide evidence for the multidimensional causes of Chinese dyslexia, but also highlight the utility of machine learning in distinguishing children with dyslexia from their peers via Chinese dictation, which elucidates a promising area of future research.

Reversing characters (digits and letters) when writing, and complete mirror writing, raise one of the oldest and most mysterious questions in developmental and educational psychology: Why do five-year-old children write symbols (e.g., [reversed E] for E) they have neither learnt nor seen? Attempts to draw up a complete explanatory theory of character reversal in writings by typically developing children were long hindered by the existence of a seemingly satisfactory explanation (left-hand writing), the failure to bring together research in neuropsychology and educational psychology, and the failure to consider the shape and structure of the characters. The present paper remedies this situation by describing a new, comprehensive theory based on recent neuropsychological findings and extensive empirical observations. The theory assumes that a character's orientation, detected in the early visual processing area, is deleted (or made inaccessible) by the mirror generalization process during transfer to memory. Consequently, there is a period, usually around age five, during which children have representations of the characters' shapes but not their orientations. Hence, when asked to write a character, children have to improvise its orientation, and the orientation they choose (implicitly, non-consciously) is often derived from the writing direction in their culture.

This article proposes two innovative approaches, the one-channel learning image recognition and the three-channel learning image recognition, to convert student's course involvements into images for early warning predictive analysis. Multiple experiments with 5235 students and 576 absolute/1728 relative input variables were conducted to verify their effectiveness. The results indicate that both methods can significantly capture more at-risk students (the highest average recall rate is equal to 77.26%) than the following machine learning algorithms--support vector machine, random forest, and deep neural network--in the middle of the semester. In addition, the innovative approaches allow minor subtypes of at-risk student identification and provide visual insights for personalized interventions. Implications and future directions are also discussed in this article.

This research project was aimed to develop an intelligent Bengali handwriting education system to improve the literacy level in Bangladesh. Due to the socio-economical limitation, all of the population does not have the chance to go to school. Here, we developed a prototype of web-based (iPhone/smartphone or computer browser) intelligent handwriting education system for autonomous learning of Bengali characters that allows students to do practice their handwriting at anywhere at any time. As an intelligent tutor, the system can automatically check the handwriting errors, such as stroke production errors, stroke sequence errors, stroke relationship errors and immediately provide colourful error feedback to the students to correct themselves. Bengali is a multi-stroke input characters with extremely long cursive shape where it has stroke order variability and stroke direction variability. Due to this structural limitation, recognition speed is a crucial issue to apply traditional online handwriting recognition algorithm. In this work, we have adopted hierarchical recognition approach to improve the recognition speed that makes our system adaptable for web-based language learning. We applied writing speed free recognition methodology together with hierarchical recognition algorithm. It ensured the learning of all aged population, especially for children and older people. Finally, we conducted a survey in Bangladesh for the performance analysis of our proposed education system. The experimental results showed that our autonomous learning methodology helped to improve the average recognition accuracy by 4.1% (from 87.2% to 91.4%) with average Mean-Opinion-Score 4.1. It confirmed that the successful use of web-based Bengali handwriting education system can be very helpful to improve the literacy level in Bangladesh within a very short period.

The purpose of this study was to explore the reading behavior of young proficient Chinese readers at preschool age. Especially, the roles of phonetic skill and Chinese Character recognition in reading comprehension were explored. 10 kindergartens were recruited to participate in the study. Subjects were 72-98 kindergarten children. Instruments include 5 measures of language assessments. Pearson product-moment correlation, ANOVA and stepwise regression were used to analyze quantitative data. Reading miscue analysis was employed to analyze children's reading style and error patterns. The results found: (1) Word recognition was a better predictor in reading fluency when comparing with Chinese phonic spelling ability, (2) Reading fluency was positively correlated with reading comprehension, (3) There were 4 types of young readers, (4) Balanced readers had the best reading comprehension abilities, (5) Young children used mostly syntax and semantics clues in miscue analysis, and (6) Reading fluency and PPVT were the two best early predictors for later reading comprehension abilities.

This paper reports on a new pedagogy for Chinese language teaching and learning at elementary schools through exploratory classroom instruction using Information and Communication Technologies. The study used quantitative method to collect data from two elementary schools of China. The results showed that: (1) the three-in-one pedagogy of "character recognition, in-class reading and in-class writing" is a new approach for enhancing the efficiency of Chinese language learning at elementary schools, and (2) the new pedagogy provides a new perspective of integrating ICT into Classroom-based Chinese Language Learning (CCLL). (Contains 7 figures and 6 tables.)

The repeated-reading strategy and optical character recognition were paired to demonstrate a functional relationship between the combined strategies and two factors: the reading rates of students with visual impairments and the students' self-perceptions, or attitudes, toward reading. The results indicated that all five students increased their reading rates, and four students' attitudes toward reading improved.

This study aims to explore early reading comprehension in Chinese-speaking children with hearing loss (HL) by examining character recognition and linguistic comprehension. Twenty-five children with HL received three measures relevant to character reading: phonological awareness (PA), morphological awareness (MA), and character recognition; two linguistic-comprehension measures: receptive vocabulary knowledge and listening comprehension; and one reading comprehension measure. Three demographic variables pertinent to children with HL were also taken into account. The results showed that the degree of HL was significantly related to reading comprehension, receptive vocabulary knowledge, and listening comprehension, the latter two of which were further correlated with the type of hearing device; however, the hearing age was associated with neither of the measures. MA made a unique contribution to character reading in the presence of PA, but the reverse was not true. Linguistic comprehension significantly accounted for additional variance in reading comprehension over and above character recognition but not "vice versa". A further analysis controlling for character recognition revealed that receptive vocabulary knowledge was more contributive to early reading comprehension than was listening comprehension. The results of the current investigation have potential to inform educational practice in teaching and/or intervening Chinese children with HL regarding their reading skills.

The current meta-analysis synthesized findings from profiling research on Chinese children with reading difficulties (RD). We reviewed a total of 81 studies published between 1964 and May 2015, representing a total of 9735 Chinese children. There are 982 effect sizes for the comparison between children with RD and age-matched typically developing (A-TD) children and 152 effect sizes for the comparison between children with RD and reading-level-matched typically developing (R-TD) children on multiple linguistic and cognitive skills. Results showed that compared to A-TD children, children with RD have severe deficits in morphological awareness, orthographic knowledge, phonological awareness, rapid naming, working memory, and visual skills and moderate deficits in short-term memory and motor skills. Compared to R-TD children, children with RD only have moderate deficits in rapid naming and mild deficits in orthographic knowledge. Moderation analyses for the comparison between RD and A-TD children revealed that children with more severe RD show more severe deficits in morphological awareness, phonological awareness, rapid naming, and visual skills. However, neither location (Mainland vs. Hong Kong) nor type of reading screening (character recognition vs. character recognition combined with reading comprehension) emerged as a moderator of the deficit profiles. These findings indicate that Chinese children with RD have deficits on a wide range of cognitive and linguistic skills. Deficits in rapid naming and orthographic knowledge may be potential causal factors for RD in Chinese based on existing evidence. Implications for the diagnosis and instructions of Chinese children with RD were discussed.

With the development of ICT, digital writing is becoming much more common in people's life. Differently from keyboarding alphabets directly to input English words, keyboarding Chinese character is always through typing phonetic alphabets and then identify the glyph provided by Pinyin input-method software while in this process which do not need users to produce orthography spelling, thus it is different from traditional written language production model based on handwriting process. Much of the research in this domain has found that using Pinyin input method is beneficial to Chinese characters recognition, but only a small part explored the effects of individual's Pinyin input experience on the Chinese characters production process. We ask whether using Pinyin input-method will strengthen the semantic-phonology linkage or semantic-orthography linkage in Chinese character mental lexicon. Through recording the RT and accuracy of participants completing semantic-syllable and semantic-glyph consistency judgments, the results found the accuracy of semantic-syllable consistency judgments in high Pinyin input experienced group was higher than that in low-experienced group, and RT was reversed. There were no significant differences on semantic-glyph consistency judgments between the two groups. We conclude that using Pinyin input method in Chinese digital writing can strengthen the semantic-phonology linkage while do not weakening the semantic-orthography linkage in mental lexicon at the same time, which means that Pinyin input method is beneficial to lexical processing involving Chinese cognition.

This study investigated Chinese children's development of sensitivity to positional (orthographic), phonological, and semantic cues of radicals in encoding novel Chinese characters. A newly designed picture-novel character mapping task, along with nonverbal reasoning ability, vocabulary, and Chinese character recognition were administered to 198 kindergartners, 172 second graders and 165 fifth graders. Children's strategies in using positional, phonological, and semantic cues of radicals varied across grades. The higher the children's grade level, the more commonly children used semantic and positional cues of radicals. Regression analyses showed that the contribution of semantic radical awareness for explaining Chinese character reading increased as children's grade increased, whereas the contribution of positional regularity awareness decreased. These findings suggest that learning Chinese characters involves a transition from a sound- and position-based approach to a meaning-based approach.

The current study examined the effectiveness of Incremental Rehearsal (IR) for teaching Chinese character recognition using a single-case experimental design. In addition, a morphological component was added to standard IR procedures (IRM) to take into account the role of morphological awareness in Chinese reading. Three kindergarten students in Hong Kong who were learning Cantonese-Chinese were taught Chinese characters with IR and IRM over six weeks using two ABAB designs. The study found that both IR and IRM effectively increased retention and maintenance of Chinese characters.

Arabic script-based text recognition system has been a popular field of research for many years that can be used in the learning and teaching process to the students and educators how to read and understand educational contents of Arabic script. The challenging nature of Arabic script recognition has attracted the attention of researchers from both industry and academic circles, but these efforts have not achieved good results until now. Segmentation of Urdu script when written in Nasta'liq writing style is a very difficult task due to the complexity of writing style as compared to Naskh writing style. Good segmentation is one of the reasons for high accuracy. Character segmentation has been a critical phase of the OCR process. The higher recognition rates for isolated characters as compared to results of words or connected character well illustrate the importance of segmentation. The current study investigates the recent work for character segmentation and challenges for segmentation for Arabic script-based languages.

This study applied speech-to-text recognition (STR) technology to assist non-native English-speaking participants to learn at a seminar given in English. How participants used transcripts generated by the STR technology for learning and their perceptions toward the STR were explored. Three main findings are presented in this study. Most participants perceived that transcripts were useful for learning. Nineteen learning strategies to use transcripts were discovered; transcripts were used to understand the topic presented, to find an answer to a question and to write summaries. Participants with different learning achievements demonstrated different learning behaviours when using transcripts. That is, some participants used transcripts effectively (i.e. studied them thoroughly and used the most important parts of them for summaries along with elaborating ideas) but some participants did not (i.e. studied transcripts superficially and employed the copy-and-paste method to complete summaries). Therefore, this study suggests how to teach participants to use transcripts by employing learning strategies meaningfully.

Having access to research-based materials is an essential component for designing effective interventions for low-achieving and disadvantaged students. The purpose of this study was to compare the effectiveness of two types of reading material intervention for low-achieving and disadvantaged students. The students were divided into experimental (n = 29) and control (n = 27) groups. The students in the control group received the alternative remediation program provided by the school. The experimental group was divided into two subgroups: 19 students received "auxiliary" reading remediation materials (the AUX group), while the other 10 received "adjusted" reading remediation materials (the ADJ group). Data were gathered from the pre and post-test results of a variety of reading and writing tests. There were three major findings. First, both the AUX and ADJ groups showed advantages in attaining results, but there were no significant differences between them in terms of promoting language skills. Furthermore, the AUX group had a slight advantage with regard to overall progress and peer catch-up rate, while the ADJ group showed higher effectiveness than the AUX group in the enhancement of academic performance. Second, the language skills of the students in the two experimental groups have relatively closed the gap with the norm. Specifically, over 50 % of the students in the AUX group achieved peer-level character recognition and dictation abilities in the second-term posttest. Third, both experimental groups demonstrated better reading skills than the control group, but there were no significant differences in terms of reading comprehension. Implications of the study will be discussed based on the findings from this study.

This paper reviewed literature from 1999 to 2014 inclusively on how Speech-to-Text Recognition (STR) technology has been applied to enhance learning. The first aim of this review is to understand how STR technology has been used to support learning over the past fifteen years, and the second is to analyze all research evidence to understand how Speech-to-Text Recognition technology can enhance learning. The findings are discussed from different perspectives as follows: (a) potentials of STR technology, (b) its use by specific groups of users in different domains, (c) quantitative and/or qualitative research methodology used, and (d) STR technology implications. Some STR literature review showed that in earlier stage of development, the STR technology was applied to assist learning only for specific users, i.e., students with cognitive and physical disabilities, or foreign students. Educators and researchers started to apply STR technology in a traditional learning environment to assist broader group of users, while STR technology has been rapidly advancing over the years. The review revealed a number of distinct advantages of using STR for learning. That is, STR-generated texts enable students to understand learning content of a lecture better, to confirm missed or misheard parts of a speech, to take notes or complete homework, and to prepare for exams. Furthermore, some implications over the STR technology in pedagogical and technological aspects were discussed in the review, such as the design of technology-based learning activities, accuracy rate of the STR process and learning behaviors to use STR-texts that may limit the STR educational value. Thus, the review furthermore discussed some potential solutions for the future research.

In the last decade e-lecturing has become more and more popular. The amount of lecture video data on the "World Wide Web" (WWW) is growing rapidly. Therefore, a more efficient method for video retrieval in WWW or within large lecture video archives is urgently needed. This paper presents an approach for automated video indexing and video search in large lecture video archives. First of all, we apply automatic video segmentation and key-frame detection to offer a visual guideline for the video content navigation. Subsequently, we extract textual metadata by applying video "Optical Character Recognition" (OCR) technology on key-frames and "Automatic Speech Recognition" (ASR) on lecture audio tracks. The OCR and ASR transcript as well as detected slide text line types are adopted for keyword extraction, by which both video- and segment-level keywords are extracted for content-based video browsing and search. The performance and the effectiveness of proposed indexing functionalities is proven by evaluation.

There is a growing amount of evidence suggesting that individuals with autism have difficulty with categorization. One basic cognitive ability that may underlie this difficulty is the ability to abstract a prototype. The current study examined prototype and category formation with dot patterns in high-functioning adults with autism and matched controls. Individuals with autism were found to have difficulty forming prototypes and categories of dot patterns. The eye-tracking data did not reveal any between group differences in attention to the dot patterns. However, relationships between performance and intelligence in the autism group suggest possible processing differences between the groups. Results are consistent with previous studies that have found deficits in prototype formation and extend these deficits to dot patterns.

Tasks tapping visual skills, orthographic knowledge, phonological awareness, speeded naming, morphological awareness and Chinese character recognition were administered to 184 kindergarteners and 273 primary school students from Beijing. Regression analyses indicated that only syllable deletion, morphological construction and speeded number naming were unique correlates of Chinese character recognition in kindergarteners. Among primary school children, the independent correlates of character recognition were rime detection, homophone judgement, morpheme production, orthographic knowledge and speeded number naming. Results underscore the importance of some dimensions of both phonological processing and morphological awareness for both very early and intermediate Chinese reading acquisition. Although significantly correlated with character recognition in younger (but not older) children, visual skills were not uniquely associated with Chinese character reading at any grade level. However, orthographic skills were strongly associated with reading in primary school but not kindergarten, suggesting that orthographic skills are more important for literacy development as reading experience increases.

Purpose: Learning Chinese is unquestionably very important and popular worldwide with the fast economic growth of China. To most foreigners and also local students, one of the major challenges in learning Chinese is to write Chinese characters in correct stroke sequences that are considered as significant in the Chinese culture. However, due to the potentially complicated structures of Chinese characters together with their stroke sequences, there are very few character recognition techniques that can effectively tackle the involved training task in an efficient and flexible manner. The purpose of this paper is to propose an intelligent and flexible e-learning software based on learning objects to facilitate the learning of writing Chinese characters in correct stroke sequences. Design/methodology/approach: The paper adopts an incremental approach in designing the overall system architecture to emphasize on extendibility of the system. The basic features of the system including the evolution and pronunciation of each Chinese character can be embedded as a part of the learning object metadata to enhance students' understanding of Chinese characters. To demonstrate the feasibility of this proposal, a prototype of the proposed e-learning software was built on smartphones such that students can learn anytime and anywhere. Findings: From the empirical evaluation of the e-learning prototype for learning to write correct Chinese characters on mobile devices, it was found that foreign students can learn and practise the writing more effectively anytime and anywhere on their mobile devices after classes. Some initial positive feedback was collected. Furthermore, a more careful and thorough evaluation is planned to be conducted in relevant courses for foreign students in the upcoming Fall semester. Originality/value: This proposal represents the first attempt to reduce the complexity while increasing the extendibility of the e-learning software to learn Chinese through learning objects running on smartphones or mobile devices in general. More importantly, it opens up numerous opportunities for further investigations including possible integrations with other existing Chinese e-learning systems. (Contains 8 figures and 2 tables.)

Whether the simple view of reading (SVR) as incorporated in the componential model of reading (CMR) is applicable to other orthographies than English was explored in this study. Spanish, with transparent orthography and Chinese, with opaque orthography were selected because of their diverse characteristics. The first part reports a study of students from grades 2 and 3, whose home language and medium of instruction was Spanish, and were administered tests of decoding, listening, and reading comprehension. A comparison group of 49 children from Grade 2, 54 children from Grade 3, and 55 children from Grade 4, whose home language and instruction was English, were also administered tests of decoding, listening, and reading comprehension. Multiple regression analysis showed that approximately 60% of the variance in reading comprehension of Spanish participants and 50% of the variance in reading comprehension of English participants were explained by decoding and listening comprehension. Furthermore, the performance of third grade Spanish participants resembled that of fourth grade English-speaking participants. In the second study, 102 Chinese students from Grade 2 and 106 students from Grade 4 were administered tasks of Chinese character recognition, reading fluency, listening, and reading comprehension. Multiple regression analyses showed character recognition and listening comprehension accounted for 25% and 42% of the variance in Chinese reading comprehension at Grades 2 and 4 respectively. These results indicate that the simple view of reading is applicable to writing systems other than that of English. (Contains 7 tables.)

Previous literature in alphabetic languages suggests that the occipital-temporal region (the ventral pathway) is specialized for automatic parallel word recognition, whereas the parietal region (the dorsal pathway) is specialized for serial letter-by-letter reading (and). However, few studies have directly examined the role of the ventral and dorsal pathways in Chinese reading compared to English reading. To investigate this issue, we adopted the degraded word processing paradigm used by Cohen et al. (2008) and compared brain regions involved in the processing of degraded Chinese characters and English words during lexical decision, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The degraded characters/words were created by inserting blank spaces between radicals of Chinese characters or syllables of English polysyllabic words. Generally, the current study replicated the effects of Cohen et al. (2008), showing that in Chinese--like in alphabetic languages--character spacing modulates both ventral (bilateral cuneus, left middle occipital gyrus) and dorsal (left superior parietal lobule and middle frontal gyrus) pathways. In addition, the current study showed greater activation in bilateral cuneus and right lingual gyrus for Chinese versus English when comparing spaced to normal stimuli, suggesting that Chinese character recognition relies more on ventral visual-spatial processing than English word recognition. Interestingly, bilateral cuneus showed monotonic patterns in response to increasing spacing, while the rest of the regions of interest showed non-monotonic patterns, indicating different profiles for these regions in visual-spatial processing. (Contains 2 tables and 6 figures.)

In Chinese orthography, a dominant character structure exists in which a semantic radical appears on the left and a phonetic radical on the right (SP characters); a minority opposite arrangement also exists (PS characters). As the number of phonetic radical types is much greater than semantic radical types, in SP characters the information is skewed to the right, whereas in PS characters it is skewed to the left. Through training a computational model for SP and PS character recognition that takes into account of the locations in which the characters appear in the visual field during learning, but does not assume any fundamental hemispheric processing difference, we show that visual field differences can emerge as a consequence of the fundamental structural differences in information between SP and PS characters, as opposed to the fundamental processing differences between the two hemispheres. This modeling result is also consistent with behavioral naming performance. This work provides strong evidence that perceptual learning, i.e., the information structure of word stimuli to which the readers have long been exposed, is one of the factors that accounts for hemispheric asymmetry effects in visual word recognition. (Contains 6 figures.)

Learning to write words may strengthen orthographic representations and thus support word-specific recognition processes. This hypothesis applies especially to Chinese because its writing system encourages character-specific recognition that depends on accurate representation of orthographic form. We report 2 studies that test this hypothesis in adult learners of Chinese. In those studies, the researchers 1st compared the effects of an online writing tutor that included character handwriting with an instructional tutor that included reading only. The writing condition led to better performance on word recognition and on character-meaning links but not on the character-phonology link. In the 2nd experiment, we added an alphabetic (Pinyin) typing tutor to strengthen the phonology link and to control for manual motor activity during instruction. This experiment replicated the effects of writing on word recognition and character-meaning links, whereas alphabetic (Pinyin) typing supported only phonological representations and the character-phonology link. Theoretically, the studies suggest constituent-specific effects: writing on orthography and alphabetic coding on phonology. We suggest the mechanism for the writing effect is the refinement of visual-spatial information needed for character recognition and the addition of a sensory-motor memory that accompanies writing. The practical implication is that an integration of character handwriting and Pinyin typing promotes learning to read Chinese in a second language learning context. (Contains 2 tables and 5 figures.)

The effects of semantic and phonetic radicals on Chinese character decoding were examined. Our results suggest that semantic and phonetic radicals are each available for access when a corresponding task emphasizes one or the other kind of radical. But in a more neutral lexical recognition task, the semantic radical is more informative. Semantic radicals that correctly pertain to character meaning facilitated reaction time in semantic categorization tasks (Experiment #1), while radicals that had no immediately interpretable relation to character meaning had a strong inhibitory effect. Likewise, phonetic radicals that accurately indicated a character's pronunciation facilitated a homonym recognition task (Experiment #2), whereas phonetic radicals that differed significantly in pronunciation from their character inhibited homonym recognition. In a lexical decision task (Experiment #3) where each character had either a blurred semantic radical or a blurred phonetic radical, the characters with a blurred semantic radical elicited a significantly higher error rate and a trend for longer response times. These results are interpreted to indicate that while educated native Chinese speakers have full use of both semantic and phonetic paths to character decoding, there is a slight predisposition to semantic decoding strategies over phonetic ones indicating that the semantic path is the default means of character recognition.

Frequency trajectory is a better measure to investigate age-limited learning effects than age of acquisition (AoA) ratings (Zevin, J. D., & Seidenberg, M. S. (2002). "Age of acquisition effects in word reading and other tasks." "Journal of Memory and Language, 47"(1), 1-29). The current study uses frequency trajectory as a variable to investigate age-limited learning effects in Chinese character recognition, and tests predictions of the arbitrary mapping hypothesis as applied in a non-alphabetic writing system. In Experiment 1, regression analyses showed that, compared to rated AoA, frequency trajectory of characters was less affected by other lexical properties, and could explain a significant proportion of variance of AoA. In Experiment 2, the frequency trajectory and predictability from orthography to pronunciation of characters were orthogonally manipulated in a character naming task. The frequency trajectory effect appeared only for the arbitrary mapping condition. In Experiment 3, frequency trajectory and predictability from orthography to meaning of characters were manipulated in a semantic category judgment task. The frequency trajectory effects were found only when the mapping from orthography to semantic is less consistent. In summary, the study confirmed that AoA is a genuine factor affecting word processing, and the AoA effects were limited to those situations in which mapping between input and output representation was arbitrary. These results provide strong cross-linguistic evidence in support of the arbitrary mapping hypothesis. (Contains 6 tables.)

We examined the relationship between rapid naming speed (RAN) and Chinese character recognition accuracy and fluency. Sixty-three grade 2 and 54 grade 4 Taiwanese children were administered four RAN tasks (colors, digits, Zhu-Yin-Fu-Hao, characters), and two character recognition tasks. RAN tasks accounted for more reading variance in grade 4 than in grade 2, and graphological RAN tasks accounted for more reading variance than RAN Colors. After controlling for age, nonverbal intelligence, phonological sensitivity, short-term memory, and orthographic processing, RAN tasks were significant predictors of character recognition fluency in grade 2, and of both accuracy and fluency in grade 4.

Chinese brush calligraphy is a valuable civilization legacy and a high art of scholarship. It is still popular in Chinese banners, newspaper mastheads, university names, and celebration gifts. There are Web sites that try to help people enjoy and learn Chinese calligraphy. However, there lacks advanced services such as content-based retrieval or vivid writing process simulation for calligraphy learning. This article proposes a novel Chinese calligraphy learning approach: First, the scanned calligraphy pages were segmented into individual calligraphy characters using minimum-bounding box. Second, the individual character's feature information was extracted and kept. Then, a corresponding database was built to serve as a map between the feature data and the original raw data. Finally, a retrieval engine was constructed and a dynamic writing process was simulated to help learners get the calligraphy character they were interested in and watch how it was generated step by step.

The complexity of Chinese orthography has hindered the progress of research in Chinese to the same level of sophistication of that in alphabetic languages such as English. Also, there has been no publicly available resource concerning the decomposition of Chinese characters, which is essential in any attempt to model the cognitive processes of Chinese character recognition. Here we report our construction and analysis of a Chinese lexical database containing the most frequent phonetic compounds decomposed into semantic and phonetic radicals according to Chinese etymology. Each radical was further decomposed into basic stroke patterns according to a Chinese transcription system, Cangjie (Chu, 1979 Laboratory of chu Bong-Foo Retrieved August 25, 2004, from http://www.cbflabs.com/). Other information such as pronunciation and character frequency were also incorporated. We examine the distribution of different types of character, the information skew in phonetic compounds, the relations between subcharacter orthographic units and the pronunciation of the entire character, and the processing implications of these phenomena in terms of universal psycholinguistic principles.

The study investigated the compensatory effectiveness of the Quicktionary Reading Pen II (the Reading Pen), a portable device with miniaturized optical character recognition and speech synthesis capabilities. Thirty participants with reading disabilities aged 10-18 were trained on the operation of the technology and given two weeks to practice decoding single words and using various dictionary functions during independent silent reading in the classroom and other settings. Participants were then given a reading comprehension test under the following conditions: (a) reading passages silently using the Reading Pen, and (b) reading passages silently without assistance. Paired sample comparisons revealed significant differences under the two conditions in favor of using the pen (p less than .0001+). Results are discussed in light of previous research on related technologies. (Contains 3 tables.)

This study deals with the demand of a task. A theoretical background shows the difficulty of applying the idea of demand (as established in the literature) to the data. This has been confirmed in the preliminary study of this paper, which deals with the analysis of university examinations. Some factors that affect the demand of a task have been identified in the second study and used (in the third study) with the construction of questions and the traditional demand to define what we think is the realistic demand of a task. (Contains 4 figures and 8 tables.)

Describes an online library catalog that was developed for an Austrian scientific library that includes table of contents in addition to the standard bibliographic information in order to increase relevance for searchers. Discusses the technology involved, including OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and automatic indexing techniques; weighted terms; and PDF (Portable Document Format - Adobe Acrobat) files. (LRW)

Describes efforts in supporting information retrieval from OCR (optical character recognition) degraded text. Reports on approaches used in an automatic cataloging and searching contest for books in multiple languages, including a vector space retrieval model, an n-gram indexing method, and a weighting scheme; and discusses problems of Asian language OCR text retrieval. (Author/LRW)

Investigates the development of phonetic awareness, and insight into the structure and function of Chinese characters that give a clue to pronunciation. Participants were 113 Chinese second, fourth, and sixth graders enrolled in a working-class Beijing, China elementary school. Results show that both character familiarity and character regularity strongly influenced performance. (Author/MKA)

Measures of phonological processing, speech perception, and Chinese character recognition were administered to Hong Kong Chinese three and four year-olds. A model predicting phonological awareness from vocabulary, short-term memory, and speech perception was supported. Both phonological awareness and letter naming predicted unique variance in character recognition after controlling for other phonological processing and vocabulary skill. (Author)

Describes the Historic Pittsburgh project at the University of Pittsburgh, a joint project with the Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania to produce a digital collection of historical materials available on the Internet. Discusses costs; metadata; digitization and preservation of originals; full-text capabilities; scanning; quality review; optical character recognition; and online access. (LRW)