Structural
Representations of Characters in Chinese Writing: Evidence from
a Case of Acquired Dysgraphia
S.-P. Law & M.-T. Leung |
In
this paper, we present writing data of a Hong Kong Chinese brain-damaged
patient with acquired dysgraphia. In light of the properties of her
writing errors, we make inferences about the structural representations
of Chinese characters in writing. We propose that `logographemes'
- a concept grounded in logography ` { - are the basic units
not only in constructing Chinese characters, but also the basic units
of processing in writing, on the basis that most of her errors in
a delayed copying task involve logographemes rather than functional
units such as the signific and the phonetic components. More specifically,
the patient's errors include substitution, deletion, insertion, and
transposition of logographemes, resulting in non-characters in most
cases, and occasionally real characters. furthermore, in errors where
2 or more logographemes are involved, the logographemes often form
larger units that may appear in real characters. This provides evidence
suggesting that the structural representation of a character is hierarchical
in nature. Key wards: Chinese, characters, acquired dysgraphia, structural representations, writing |