Early Chinese Writing

Chinese children's early knowledge about writing.

Much research on literacy development has focused on learners of alphabetic writing systems. Researchers have hypothesized that children learn about the formal characteristics of writing before they learn about the relations between units of writing and units of speech. We tested this hypothesis by examining young Chinese children's understanding of writing. Mandarin-speaking 2- to 5-year-olds ...

Early differentiation between drawing and writing in Chinese children.

Children under 3½ years of age or so are often thought to produce the same types of scribbles for writing and drawing. We tested this idea by asking Chinese 2- to 6-year-olds to write and draw four targets. In Study 1, Chinese adults judged the status of the productions as writings or drawings. The adults performed significantly above the level expected by chance even with the productions of 2-...

Early Writing Collection Early Printing and Writing Collection

Enhancing the Chinese writing skills of non-Chinese speaking students

Background A majority of the ethnic minority students living in Hong Kong acknowledge the importance of knowing the Chinese language for their future education and employment opportunities in Hong Kong. However, a survey revealed that 91% of respondents did not know how to write Chinese or considered their writing skills to be poor [1]. Another survey [2] found that 31% of those who had lived i...

writing in early mesopotamia project

The Writing in Early Mesopotamia (WEM) project endeavors to provide a comprehensive description of how the technology of cuneiform writing represented language. The project will investigate early cuneiform writing from the perspective of both language — how sound and meaning are systematically expressed diachronically and synchronically — and semiotics — the graphic organization and history of ...