A Review of Psycholinguistic Implications for Linguistic Relativity : A Case Study of Chinese

visual designs or faces. However, they did perform better in memorizing nonsense syllables. In comparing this result with the results of Woo and Hoosain (1984), Hoosain comes to the conclusion that poor readers in Chinese have more visual problems than poor readers in English. Apparently, Hoosain misinterprets the nature and the implication of the results obtained by Woo and Hoosain. The finding that poor readers made more visual distracter errors indicates that they were relying more heavily than good readers on the visual characteristics of the characters when trying to encode them for immediate recall. As a result, poor readers were penalized more by the graphic similarities brought about by the visual distracters. The finding does not, as Hoosain interprets it, simply indicate that poor readers in Chinese have more visual problems. In a comparable study by Ren and Mattingly (1990), it was found that good readers in Chinese were relatively more affected by phonologically similar series than poor readers when performing immediate recall of series of Chinese characters. These results are comparable to those found for English readers (Shankweiler, Liberman, Mark, Fowler, and Fischer, 1979). In neither of those two studies, the results were interpreted by the authors as evidence that good readers had more phonological problems than poor readers. Rather, they were taken to suggest that good readers rely more heavily than poorer readers on phonological encoding, hence were penalized more by the phonological similarity introduced in the experimental stimuli. 7 So, the results of Woo and Hoosain (1984) and Ren and Mattingly (1990) both show that one of the crucial differences between good and poor readers in Chinese is in the manner in which they recode reading material; Good readers use more phonological encoding while poor readers rely more on visual encoding. This agrees, rather than contrasts, with findings about the differences between good and poor readers in English (Shankweiler et al.). In a study by Chen and Juola (1982), native Chinese and English speaking subjects had to decide which of the items on separate test lists was graphemically, phonemically or semantically similar to the item just presented visually. Chinese subjects were found to be fastest in making graphic similarity decisions about characters while American subjects were found to be fastest in phonemic similarity judgments. Chen and Juola then concluded, as reported by Hoosain without reservation, that "Chinese words produce more distinctive visual information, but English words result in a more integrated code." Thus the two different "scripts activate different coding and memory mechanisms." Hoosain, however, does not notice at least two problems with the study. First, the study claimed to use words as stimuli both for English and Chinese. However, of the 144 characters used, 26 could function only as bound morphemes according to the frequency dictionary of Wang et al. (1986), and another 11 could not even be found in that dictionary. Using bound morphemes in Chinese necessarily involves more