Investigating the Nature of Naxi Dongba Script from a Cognitive Perspective
This paper uses cognitive-psychology experiments with Naxi Dongba priests to test, empirically, whether Dongba script functions more like pictures or more like ideographic Chinese characters. Across three studies — holistic-processing effects of familiarity, concreteness, typicality, and complexity; component-count, category-symbol-priming, and phonetic-marking-symbol experiments on compound characters; and comparative naming/categorization of Dongba characters, Chinese characters, and pictures — the authors find that Dongba script shows the same holistic effects as both pictures and Chinese characters, but that its category symbols have not become true semantic radicals, its phonetic-marking symbols have not become true phonetic radicals, and in naming/categorization tasks Dongba characters pattern with pictures rather than with Chinese characters. They conclude Dongba script is a "discourse/utterance script" still close to pictographic writing, in an early transition toward a word-representing script, with compound characters functioning more like combinations of simple, picture-like units than like Chinese phono-semantic compounds.
This page publishes the bibliographic record and the project's summary. The scanned article text belongs to its publisher and is shown to readers under a research-use policy; it is not reproduced in this record.